Feature Request

[McVicker, Eric A]

Greetings,

   I've been using binutils 2.15 for some time now, and wanted to know
how difficult it would be to add the idea of an EXCLUDE keyword to the
linker command script language?  For our specific purposes we have
computers that cannot have their equipment changed out (they're launched
satellites).  As the hardware has aged, some memory banks have developed
address ranges that are bad.  However, we run in a memory constrained
environment, so we can't just ignore massive chunks of memory.

So what would be nice would be something of the following nature:

MEMORY {   BLOCK1 (rx) : ORIGIN = address, LENGTH = length
           { EXCLUDE( address, length)
             EXCLUDE( address, length)
           }
           BLOCK2 (rw) : ORIGIN = address, LENGTH = length
}

SECTIONS {
	.text : { *(.text .stub .text.*) *(.gnu.linkone.t.*) } > BLOCK1
	...
}

And have it link all of the sections together and jump around the
excluded memory regions?  Is the currently doable with the tools, and I
can't figure it out?  If it's not already available, I think it would be
a great value-added feature for the tools in the future.

Thanks,

Eric A. McVicker

Embedded Software Engineer
The Boeing Company
1800 S. Price Rd.
Chandler, AZ  85248

W: (480) 722-7327
P: 8776970046@skytel.com