bug#20868: 24.5; Emacs dumper should be portable

bug#20868: 24.5; Emacs dumper should be portable

[Philipp Stephani]

I think the Emacs dumper should be rewritten to no longer rely on
reading its process memory and writing an executable file.  This
prevents ASLR and PIE, doesn't work on all systems, and requires some
workarounds.  The dumper should serialize the internal data structures
in a portable format (e.g. FlatBuffer) instead.



In GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin14.1.0, NS apple-appkit-1344.72)
 of 2015-04-12 on p
Windowing system distributor `Apple', version 10.3.1347
Configured using:
 `configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.5
 --enable-locallisppath=/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp
 --infodir=/usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.5/share/info/emacs
 --with-file-notification=gfile --with-dbus --with-gnutls --with-rsvg
 --with-imagemagick --without-popmail --with-ns
 --disable-ns-self-contained'

Important settings:
  value of $LANG: de_DE.UTF-8
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

Major mode: Lisp Interaction

Minor modes in effect:
  tooltip-mode: t
  electric-indent-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t

Recent messages:
For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a.

Load-path shadows:
None found.

Features:
(shadow sort gnus-util mail-extr emacsbug message format-spec rfc822 mml
easymenu mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231
mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums
mm-util help-fns mail-prsvr mail-utils time-date tooltip electric
uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type mwheel ns-win tool-bar dnd
fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list newcomment lisp-mode
prog-mode register page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar
mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax facemenu font-core frame cham georgian
utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean
japanese hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian
cyrillic chinese case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev
minibuffer nadvice loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files
text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule
custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote make-network-process
dbusbind gfilenotify cocoa ns multi-tty emacs)

Memory information:
((conses 16 72033 5331)
 (symbols 48 17540 0)
 (miscs 40 36 127)
 (strings 32 9868 5136)
 (string-bytes 1 263333)
 (vectors 16 9021)
 (vector-slots 8 377069 14448)
 (floats 8 55 72)
 (intervals 56 184 0)
 (buffers 960 11))

bug#20868: 24.5; Emacs dumper should be portable

[Glenn Morris]

Philipp Stephani wrote

> I think the Emacs dumper should be rewritten to no longer rely on
> reading its process memory and writing an executable file.  

It's a long-standing TODO item. Patches welcome.

See eg
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg01034.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-06/msg00452.html

bug#20868: 24.5; Emacs dumper should be portable

[Glenn Morris]

Version: 27.1

This was added in d12e5d0.