The current implementation is emitting a global constant that happens
to evaluate to the same bytes + relocation as a jump instruction on
X86. This does not work for PIE executables and shared libraries
though, because we end up with a wrong relocation type. And it has no
chance of working on ARM/AArch64 which use different relocation types
for jump instructions (R_ARM_JUMP24) that is never generated for
data.
This change replaces the constant with module-level inline assembly
followed by a hidden declaration of the jump table. Works fine for
ARM/AArch64, but has some drawbacks.
- Extra symbols are added to the static symbol table, which inflate
the size of the unstripped binary a little. Stripped binaries are not
affected. This happens because jump table declarations must be
external (because their body is in the inline asm).
- Original functions that were anonymous are now named
<original name>.cfi, and it affects symbolization sometimes. This is
necessary because the only user of these functions is the (inline
asm) jump table, so they had to be added to @llvm.used, which does
not allow unnamed functions.
You no longer need this variable.