IDA show xrefs in .pdata and nothing else

Question

I'm debugging the Windows ARM64 version's EFI (bootaa64.efi).

Using QEMU and GDB I was able to find that bootaa64.efi was stuck in one of the two functions BlKernelSp0SystemErrorHandler and BlKernelExceptionHandler. The image below is two functions when I load bootaa64.efi to IDA.

I'm not really good at ARM64 assembly but I recognized these functions are just forever loops.

The code stuck in that loop means somehow the function is called. But IDA just show two xref, one is the function call itself (loop) and the other is .pdata xref:

I want to know what called these functions. Thanks!

Answer 1

These functions look like exception handlers and are probably “called” by the processor when an exception or a fault happens. You need to inspect system registers to determine the cause of the exception and where it happened. See the ARM manuals for more information.