Re: How to list all symbolic names for references to global varibables and functions with objdump (for MIPS arch)?

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Pan,

> It does be difficult to recoginse all direct or inredirect references
> in all cases. But I just want objdump to recoginse all direct
> references, like variable assignments and argument passing.

Please feel free to have a go at implementing this then.  For just 
simple direct memory references it should not be too hard.

> I think
> gcc keeps a reference table for each symbol during compilation since
> gcc can give warnings about unused variables and functions. Maybe
> these messages are discarded on linking.

Yes.  In fact a lot of information that gcc holds about a program is 
lost when it emits the assembler output.

> My goal is to implement support for .init sections in my system. So I
> want to design a tiny tool to find out all init functions
> automatically. I think this can be achieved by the following approach:
> 1. The entry function is an init function.
> 2. A function is called only by init functions is an init function

Well 2. might not necessarily be true.  For example if an init function 
calls malloc() that does not necessarily mean that malloc() is an init 
function.

What exactly do you mean by "support for .init sections" anyway ?  Are 
you trying to perform some kind of garbage collection like the linkers 
--gc-sections option ?

Cheers
  Nick