Relative expressions and ASSERT

[Alan Modra]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 08:50:56AM -0800, H.J. Lu wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 09:32:43PM +1030, Alan Modra wrote:
> >> How to people feel about this for 2.21.1?
> >
> > IMO, this is a more logical behavior. And there's going to be some
> > incompatibilities in the linker script language whether we do it or
> > not.
> >
> 
> I am against regressions in known linker scripts, including those
> in linker testsuites. We should take a closer look at what we did
> and fix it properly.

You would rather stay with expression evaluation that we couldn't even
describe?

I made a deliberate change, trying to minimize breakage but knowing
that we surely would break some scripts that use more complex
expressions.  I also knew that symbol assignment outside of an output
section statement would result in absolute symbols, but hoped this
would not affect too many people.  It seems it does, so I offered this
further patch that cures the symbol assignment problem, *and*
simplifies the linker expression evaluation rules.  The tradeoff being
that this may break more complex expressions.

Can you verify that this fixes the x86_64 kernel build breakage?

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM