GNU linker on MIPS and the _etext section ....

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 14:17:50 +0530
   From: "Koundinya.K" <kk@ddeorg.soft.net>

	   I have some doubt regarding the _etext section.

_etext is not a section.  It is a symbol.  It normally marks the end
of the .text section.

   I am still in the process 
   of debugging the GNU linker. After some hours of debugging last night I 
   found that my runtime linker is getting killed because a call to the _etext 
   is resulting in a procedure linkage table entry for my run time linker. 

Nothing is calling _etext.  gdb is seeing a call to some address.  It
can't find a symbol associated with that address.  The address happens
to be after _etext, so it decides to call the address _etext plus
something.  Don't pay any attention to _etext--that's just a red
herring resulting from how gdb decides to display addresses.

Your program is actually calling into code for which gdb can not find
any debugging information.  This code is probably in the dynamic
linker, or in a shared library.

Ian