[RFA] Coff SEC_LOAD vs SEC_NEVER_LOAD

[Svein E. Seldal]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> It gets turned on for COFF STYP_NOLOAD sections, and for output
> sections marked as NOLOAD in linker scripts.

Well, that is my headache right now. ld does not turn on the STYP_NOLOAD 
regardless of NOLOAD's use or not. A quick debug of ld reveals that the 
sec_to_styp_flags() convertion function in bfd is called with the value 
0, which is incorrect for this section.

Yet earlier on, lang_enter_output_section_statement() in ld is called 
for each segment and returns 0x400 for those segments which uses the 
NOLOAD statement. So somewhere inbetween something is filtering our flags.

Do you have any pointer on where I should look? I mean, I have tried to 
debug this thing out now, but I'm still clueless.

BTW. This is correct linkscript syntax, right:
     .dummy (NOLOAD) : { . += 0x2; }


When it comes to the gdb bug, I found this construct:

   if (bfd_get_section_flags (abfd, asec) & SEC_LOAD)

Would you reccommend submitting a patch to gdb which would exclude the 
segments with SEC_NEVER_LOAD?

-or-

Modify the entire BFD and do s/SEC_NEVER_LOAD/!SEC_LOAD/? This is a big 
job that I'm not feeling called to do....


Regards,
Svein