[BUG?] GCC 4.5.2 produces deprecated ARM relocation

[Ben Gamari <bgamari dot foss at gmail dot com>]

I was recently trying to test GCC's behavior in producing various types
of ARM relocations. In particular, I was trying to produce an
R_ARM_JUMP24 relocation, which requires veneer. It was suggested that
the code most likely to produce this relocation would involve some sort
of tail recursion. I wrote up a small test[1] involving interworking and
tail recursion to see what the produced object might look like. To my
surprise, I found that the compiler instead[2] produced the deprecated
R_ARM_PLT32 relocation. Considering the deprecated state of this
relocation type, should this be considered a bug? Being a linker
implementer, I for one would greatly appreciate it if GCC tried to only
use non-deprecated relocation types. I apologize if this has already
been fixed upstream.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://github.com/bgamari/arm-interworking-test

[2] 

$ make
cc -marm -fPIC   -c -o main.o main.c
cc -mthumb -fPIC   -c -o thumb.o thumb.c
gcc main.o thumb.o -o test.o
$ objdump -r main.o

main.o:     file format elf32-littlearm

RELOCATION RECORDS FOR [.text]:
OFFSET   TYPE              VALUE 
00000008 R_ARM_PLT32       hi