hppa, global symbols and the BL instruction

[Florian Weimer]

Could anybody please enlight me why the following does not assemble on
HPPA?

        .text
        .org . + 262144
        .globl  foo
foo:
        bl      foo, %r0

(The .org instruction is only used to avoid insert many instructions,
which are otherwise required to trigger this bug.)

I would have expect that foo is reachable with a 17-bit displacement
even if foo is a global symbol.  But instead, I get this error message:

foo.s:5: Error: Field out of range [-262144..262143] (-262152).

This happens with Debian's binutils 2.15-6 on hppa, and also with the
current binutils version in unstable.

Sorry if this is the wrong list for such questions.