Generic object attributes patch

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2007, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 07:58:49PM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> > Does it support attributes in DSO? I thought you would need
> > a new program segment type for it.
> 
> Why?  These are for ld, not ld.so.

And when we do add some attribute it's of use for ld.so to know about, at 
that point we can always either add a new segment for attributes or make 
ld use the information in some other way to make it available to ld.so.

This patch is intended to make the infrastructure currently available on 
ARM available more generally, with the same facilities as are available on 
ARM.

The ARM infrastructure in binutils doesn't really support the use 
attributes on sections or functions that is documented in the EABI (only 
attributes on whole files), so the generic infrastructure doesn't - but as 
and when support for the attributes on sections and functions is added, it 
will then be available to all targets.  (Adding that support would of 
course need assembler support, maybe reusing any assembler syntax for this 
that the ARM assembler has.)

Similarly, it can be incrementally enhanced in other directions (such as 
providing information to ld.so).  This is very much an infrastructure 
patch, making a well-defined attribute format available more generally for 
whatever people wish to use it for, with the expectation that the code 
will evolve and new features will be added as people find more uses for 
it.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com