[U-Boot] [PATCH v3] Switch from archive libraries to partial linking

[Sebastien Carlier]

Dear Albert,

On 2010-11-19 13:38:00, Albert ARIBAUD wrote:
> 
> Le 19/11/2010 13:33, Sebastien Carlier a écrit :
> >
> >Is it not possible to tell the linker to place a made-up 32 kB symbol
> >within the text section at address 0x40008000?  I am not familiar enough
> >with ld to tell whether there are restrictions for setting the absolute
> >address of a symbol that would disallow it in this case.
> 
> You can force a symbol to reside at a given offset, but that will
> not make the linker "skip" that symbol when filling the output
> section, if that's what you meant.

Yes, I was hoping the linker would first allocate space for
absolute-address symbols and then fill the gaps with the remaining
symbols in whatever order.

> If you read up the binutils doc, you'll see that ld fills output
> sections based on a "location pointer" (the "dot") that simply moves
> on with each input section added -- no skipping, and no jumping from
> one region to another either.

I see, thank you for pointing this out.  This specific behavior actually
seems quite essential to the interpretation of linker scripts, so there
is probably no hope for any change there.

I very much like your idea of splitting the binary when flashing and
recomposing it into RAM during copying just before relocation, it looks
very flexible and elegant.  A separate solution is still needed for
running from flash... apart from switching back to archive libraries and
using --whole-archive, I am out of ideas at the moment.

Regards,
-- 
Sebastien