This is the mail archive of the
binutils@sourceware.org
mailing list for the binutils project.
Re: Linker Bug or Design Intent (Absolute symbols in zero sized sections)
On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 09:30:24AM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> Convert section relative symbol to absolute shouldn't be a problem
> in most cases. If we know it may be a problem at link time, we can
> keep it section relative.
You keep saying this, but on various platforms it isn't true. Section
relative symbols move with an object if it is relocated in any way.
Absolute symbols don't. So, for instance any application which reads
the symbol table of a shared library can tell the difference.
And there are plenty of known platforms (e.g. Windows, SymbianOS,
VxWorks) where the distance between segments changes at load time,
so converting a relative symbol into an absolute one makes it useless;
we must be able to figure out which segment it was relative to.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery