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Fix hyperscan build when using non-hermetic LLVM toolchain - #43479

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Feb 13, 2026
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Fix hyperscan build when using non-hermetic LLVM toolchain#43479
phlax merged 2 commits into
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krinkinmu:test-contrib-build

Fix typos and formatting

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Request (pr/43479/main@4d2119b)

krinkinmu @krinkinmu 4d2119b #43479 merge main@dbce7cb

Fix hyperscan build when using non-hermetic LLVM toolchain

Commit Message:

When using non-hermetic LLVM toolchain the path to the nm and objcopy tools provided via environment variables to the hyperscan build script are not correct.

When using non-hermetic toolchain, make C++ toolchain make variables NM and OBJCOPY will have absolute paths to the host tools, so prefixing them actually turns correct paths to incorrect onces.

So one change that this PR does is to check if we are using a non-hermetic toolchain and if so, just pass in $(NM) and $(OBJCOPY) without modifications.

The other part of this PR modifies the hyperscan slightly to make build_wrapper.sh fail when one of the commands in the script fails.

The reason for this change is that currently, if this script cannot find nm and objcopy tools (i.e., when you don't have them installed - which could happen if you use non-hermetic compiler or, before this PR, because we added a prefix to the host tool paths that wasn't needed) it does not fail, but still does not produce quite correct result.

What you will have in the end is a failure during envoy-contrib linking due to linker failing to find definitions for a bunch of the symbols.

Let me try to explain what is going on there...

Hyperscan, specifically when we use fat runtime option, does something quite clever and quite terrible - it builds the same library source code several times enabling different optimizations and links all those together into the final hyperscan library.

It will build a version of the library assuming that AVX512 instruction set is available, another version of the library that assumes that AVC512VBMI instruction set is available and so on. Thus we will have multiple versions of the same library built with different optimizations.

Then it takes each of these versions and using nm and objcopy modifies the names of exported symbols adding a prefix to them to avoid name collisions later when it will link them together (remember all of them are built from the same source).

Finally, it links all those versions together into one library and provides a dispatcher function - this dispatcher function during runtime detects what instruction sets are actually available on the machine and calls an appropriate implementation for that instruction set.

The build_wrapper.sh script is what takes the compiled object files and renames symbols in it to avoid name collision.

The build_wrapper.sh is written in such a way that when nm or objcopy are not available - it does not fail. You can do a simple experiment for yourself and run the following script:

blahblah > /tmp/test.file
if test -s /tmp/test.file
then
        blahblah-again
fi

Even though neither blahblah nor blahblah-again command exists (and you will see an error about it in the output) the overall script status code when you run it will be 0 (e.g. echo $? will return 0).

A similar thing happens in build_wrapper.sh when it cannot find the objcopy or nm tool - the script does not fail, but it does not produce the object file we expect it to produce.

When later CMake links libhs.a out of the available object files it links everything that exists and produces libhs.a, which miss a bunch of symbol definitions, but otherwise is still a valid static library.

Because libhs.a build didn't fail properly, we proceed to eventually linking envoy-contrib (that's where hyperscan is used) and at that point linker discovers that we don't have all the symbol definitions available.

Why just not use hermetic toolchain?

I'd be happy to, but available published LLVM toolchains are quite limited and only support a few OS (note when it comes to hyperscan, it's specifically limited to x86 architecture, so architecture is not the issue here).

So if you're buildin on Linux other that RedHat or Ubuntu - you're basically out of luck at the moment unfortunately.

Many companies and communities publish custom built LLVM toolchains, but when they do, it's still typically done in format of a package for whatever is the package manager of the platform (e.g., deb, rpm, etc) and toolchains_llvm that we use to download hermetic LLVM toolchain does not support those.

Additional Description:

NOTE: I have a PR for the hyperscan library to change their build_wrapper.sh to be a bit more robust (intel/hyperscan#455), but judging by the history of the repository, it appears that they do not accept external PRs (or at least have not accepted them for a while), so I'm not hopleful.

Risk Level: Low
Testing: Manually that envoy-contrib builds successfully and that if nm and objcopy aren't found, the build will fail early; +ci
Docs Changes: n/a
Release Notes: n/a
Platform Specific Features: n/a

Environment

Request variables

Key Value
ref 12045b7
sha 4d2119b
pr 43479
base-sha dbce7cb
actor krinkinmu @krinkinmu
message Fix hyperscan build when using non-hermetic LLVM toolchain...
started 1770996243.19433
target-branch main
trusted false
Build image

Container image/s (as used in this CI run)

Key Value
default docker.io/envoyproxy/envoy-build:86873047235e9b8232df989a5999b9bebf9db69c
mobile docker.io/envoyproxy/envoy-build:mobile-86873047235e9b8232df989a5999b9bebf9db69c
Version

Envoy version (as used in this CI run)

Key Value
major 1
minor 38
patch 0
dev true