GNU linker on mips

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 11:45:43 +0100
   From: ralf@uni-koblenz.de

   On Mon, Feb 01, 1999 at 11:57:54AM +0530, Koundinya.K wrote:

   > My native ld sets the ENTRY to __start as on IRIX Systems.

   Can anybody explain why IRIX uses a non-zero value for __start?  That
   triggered quite a number of bugs in basically every piece of software that
   tries to load ELF binaries into memory ...  So far we're just doing the same
   thing for mips*-*-linux but there not really a good reason.

I don't know of any system which uses a zero value for __start.  Most
systems protect the zero page to catch null pointer dereferences.  Why
do you expect __start to be zero?  What sorts of problems are you
seeing?

Ian