Go 1.21 already breaks one of the three patches.
The complexity of the patches will likely increase,
and we only ever need to actively maintain the highest set of patches,
so splitting by major version feels natural.
At linker stage, we now encrypt funcInfo.entryoff value with a simple algorithm (1 xor + 1 mul).
This makes it harder to relate function metadata (e.g. name) to function itself in binary, almost without affecting performance.
The patch to the linker does this when generating the pclntab,
which is the binary section containing func names.
When `-tiny` is being used, we look for unexported funcs,
and set their names to the offset `0` - a shared empty string.
We also avoid including the original name in the binary,
which saves a significant amount of space.
The following stats were collected on GOOS=linux,
which show that `-tiny` is now about 4% smaller:
go build 1203067
garble build 782336
(old) garble -tiny build 688128
(new) garble -tiny build 659456
This value is hard-coded in the linker and written in a header.
We could rewrite the final binary, like we used to do with import paths,
but that would require once again maintaining libraries to do so.
Instead, we're now modifying the linker to do what we want.
It's not particularly hard, as every Go install has its source code,
and rebuilding a slightly modified linker only takes a few seconds at most.
Thanks to `go build -overlay`, we only need to copy the files we modify,
and right now we're just modifying one file in the toolchain.
We use a git patch, as the change is fairly static and small,
and the patch is easier to understand and maintain.
The other side of this change is in the runtime,
as it also hard-codes the magic value when loading information.
We modify the code via syntax trees in that case, like `-tiny` does,
because the change is tiny (one literal) and the affected lines of code
are modified regularly between major Go releases.
Since rebuilding a slightly modified linker can take a few seconds,
and Go's build cache does not cache linked binaries,
we keep our own cached version of the rebuilt binary in `os.UserCacheDir`.
The feature isn't perfect, and will be improved in the future.
See the TODOs about the added dependency on `git`,
or how we are currently only able to cache one linker binary at once.
Fixes#622.
Daniel Martí
pagran