[REINSTATED] Re: [PATCH,trunk+2.20.1] Extend COFF .section directive syntax to specify alignment.

[Dave Korn <dave dot korn dot cygwin at googlemail dot com>]

On 17/01/2010 23:41, Alan Modra wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 06:37:59PM +0000, Dave Korn wrote:
>>   There's currently no way to specify the alignment of a section in the
>> assembler;
> 
> Huh?
> 
>  .text
>  nop
> 
>  .data
>  .p2align 7
>  .long 123
> 
> $ gas/as-new /src/tmp/align.s
> $ binutils/objdump -h a.out 
> 
> a.out:     file format pe-i386
> 
> Sections:
> Idx Name          Size      VMA       LMA       File off  Algn
>   0 .text         00000004  00000000  00000000  0000008c  2**2
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, CODE
>   1 .data         00000080  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**7
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA
>   2 .bss          00000000  00000000  00000000  00000000  2**2
>                   ALLOC

  Ah, hang on.

  What I should have said was: There is currently no way to specify an
alignment *less than the default section alignment* for a section:

> $ for x in 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 ; do echo " .text ; nop ; .data ; .p2al
> ign $x; .long 123; .end " | as -o test.o - ; objdump -h test.o | grep '\.data'
> ; done
>   1 .data         00001000  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**12
>   1 .data         00000800  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**11
>   1 .data         00000400  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**10
>   1 .data         00000200  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**9
>   1 .data         00000100  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**8
>   1 .data         00000080  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**7
>   1 .data         00000040  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**6
>   1 .data         00000020  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**5
>   1 .data         00000010  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**4
>   1 .data         00000008  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**3
>   1 .data         00000004  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**2
>   1 .data         00000004  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**2
>   1 .data         00000004  00000000  00000000  00000090  2**2
> 
> $

  LTO requires sections to be 2**0 aligned, because they have to be exactly
sized to their contents: any trailing padding fatally confuses the zlib stream
decompressor.  See also gas/config/obj-coff.c!coff_frob_section(), where it
forcibly pads out section sizes to the default alignment:

>   /* The COFF back end in BFD requires that all section sizes be
>      rounded up to multiples of the corresponding section alignments,
>      supposedly because standard COFF has no other way of encoding alignment
>      for sections.  If your COFF flavor has a different way of encoding
>      section alignment, then skip this step, as TICOFF does.  */

  So I don't think I can leave it 4-aligned but have the size 1-byte granular,
if that warning is anything to go by.  Therefore I think I need a way to
under-ride the default section size.  Is there anything else you can think of
that already exists and will do what I want, or should I revive this patch?

    cheers,
      DaveK