Re: relax jalr $t9 [R_MIPS_JALR symbol] to bal symbol

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Mar 25, 2003, Richard Henderson <rth at redhat dot com> wrote:

> Here in relax_section, we have not *really* committed to an
> object layout.  Nearly, yes, but not quite.

If we actually did any size-changing relaxation, we might have offset
changes, but since we don't, this is not an issue.  Offsets between
sections mapped into the same segment remain constant, and that's what
makes using branches so appealing.  I don't feel as confident using
jumps, but then, IIRC we do have a relocation for jumps, so we could
do with them as well.  But then, we wouldn't be able to tell for sure
whether the jump would be in-range before making the transformation,
and then, if we did it, when we find out it's not, we won't know it's
safe to go back.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva at {redhat dot com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva at {lsd dot ic dot unicamp dot br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer