Why is ld.gold better than ld for intel sgx?

[shmoo]

The documentation Intel_SGX_Developer_Reference_Linux_2.13.3 suggests:

You are also encouraged to help harden your enclaves, by passing one of the following options to the linker, to put read-only non-executable sections in your own segment:

ld.gold --rosegment

or,

-Wl,-fuse-ld=gold –Wl,--rosegment

Why is it better to use ld.gold?

Wikipedia says:

Fedora has moved gold from binutils into its own package due to concerns it is suffering from bitrot after Google's interest has moved to LLVM.^[6]

[JesusG_Intel]

Hello shmoo,

I am working with engineering on getting clarification on why they recommend using ld.gold. I apologize for the delay.

Sincerely,

Jesus G.

Intel Customer Support

[JesusG_Intel]

Hello shmoo,

I apologize for the delay. I will reply to this thread as soon as I have an answer.

Sincerely,

Jesus G.

Intel Customer Support

[JesusG_Intel]

Hello shmoo,

ld.gold is recommended only because it further enforces readonly non-executable segments. It is not necessarily better than ld.

Sincerely,

Jesus G.

Intel Customer Support

[shmoo]

Hello Jesus,

Thank you for asking the engineering team!

What does it mean, that it further enforces read-only non-executable segments?

Sincerely,
David

[JesusG_Intel · Accepted solution]

Hello David,

Read-only non-executable memory segments help prevent buffer overflow and other memory attacks. Attackers cannot write to or execute code in these memory segments. ld.gold has also been reported to be a faster linker than ld. I recommend doing a web search on this topic for more information.

Sincerely,

Jesus G.

Intel Customer Support

[JesusG_Intel]

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