With the release of binutils/ld 2.36, ld swapped to much improved default settings when producing windows binaries with mingw-w64. One of these changes was to stop stripping the .reloc section from binaries, which is required for working ASLR.
When we switched to using a newer Guix time-machine in #23778, we begun using binutils 2.37 to produce releases. Since then, our windows installer (produced with makensis) has not functioned correctly when run on a Windows system with the “Force randomization for images (Mandatory ASLR)” option enabled. Note that all of our other release binaries, which all contain .reloc sections, function fine under the same option, so it cannot be just the presence of a .reloc section that is the issue.
The root cause of the problem is that when we compile NSIS (makensis), a number of exe installer stubs are produced at the same time, for use later when makensis is actually run. Given the new linker defaults, the stubs will contain .reloc sections, when previously they would not. It seems that, in combination with how makensis mutates the stub when it actually builds the installer, causes the problem.
According to upstream, https://sourceforge.net/p/nsis/bugs/1131/#abb6:
Looks like the problem is the very existance of the .reloc section. It’s not supposed to be there, and makensis doesn’t handle it.
The most recent .reloc related upstream activity is in https://sourceforge.net/p/nsis/bugs/1283/, where the conclusion again seemed to be that .relo sections are not wanted, but there hasn’t been any further follow up.
For now, restore pre-binutils-2.36 behaviour, by passing -Wl,--disable-reloc-section
to the linker when building the installer stubs, which fixes the produced installer.
The underlying issue can be further investigated in future.
.reloc section stripping is something we’ve accounted for previously, see #18702, and related upstream discussion is in this thread: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19011.
Fixes #25726.
Guix Build (x86_64):
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Guix Build (arm64):
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