deeper understanding of ld

[Andreas Schwab]

Ingo Krabbe <i.krabbe@dokom.net> writes:

|> Hi,
|> 
|> I think I need to go deeper into gnu-ld... That's my problem:
|> 
|> When I compile an XServer from scratch with make World everything goes
|> fine until I try to start it.
|> 
|> Newer versions of XFree are shipped with modules linked by
|> 
|> 	ld -r -o module.o foo.o bar.o ...
|> 
|> When the XFree86 program tries to load these modules it gets errors like
|> 
|> Not loading .rodata.str1.1
|> Not loading .rodata.str1.32
|> Not loading .rodata.cst4
|> 	... more following
|> 
|> resulting finally in unresolved symbols concerning the module object.

This is a bug in the ELF loader of XFree86 (patch available on request).
It is looking at the section's name to decide whether to load it, and
misses a whole lot of new cases.  This ELF loader is a big horrible mess
that should be rewritten from scratch.  Interestingly enough, the Linux
modutils have a very clean implementation of the same thing which did not
need any bit of changes due to the new merge/string sections feature.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE GmbH, Deutschherrnstr. 15-19, D-90429 Nürnberg
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