arm questions

[Philip Blundell]

>Some folks in England put together ARM GNU/Linux, but they took a very
>long time to get the copyright stuff done.  For some reason that I do
>not know, that implementation used REL rather than RELA relocs.

Yes, it was all a bit of a mess.  In fact (for the benefit of anybody who 
actually wants the whole gory history) the original implementation that I 
hacked together for ARM GNU/Linux *did* use RELA relocs.  Then Pat and Scott 
from Corel produced a rather more complete implementation (one that included 
PIC support) based on the i386 code and hence using REL, and that was the code 
base that we ended up using.

In fact as far as Linux is concerned it probably wouldn't be an especially 
big deal to introduce RELA in parallel with REL if we wanted to.  I think 
there were rumblings that the ARM SDT compiler was primarily using RELA, so we 
might end up doing it in order to be able to interwork with them.  Our dynamic 
linker can be taught to handle binaries with an arbitrary mix of reloc types, 
I think, and I imagine binutils can be made to handle this too if it doesn't 
already.

>   2)
>   Whats the R_ARM_THM_XPC22 reloc for?
>
>I dunno.  Philip Blundell is on the list.  Phil, do you know?

Actually no.  Thumb isn't really my area.  I've sent a Cc of this mail to Lee 
Smith (who did the original assignment of reloc numbers if I remember right).
Lee, any ideas?

p.