SPARC gold / ld support

[Jorge Pérez]

Hello,

I'm looking forward to implement the SPARC V8 for an embedded
application and since I have very limited memory resources, I'm
interested in obtaining the best possible code density. I'm wondering
if with these regards is there a remarkable difference between LD and
GOLD?

Besides, given the hard constraints of my target, I do not need / care
about the code being position independent (PIC). In fact, I
intentionally located the .rodata section of my programs at 0x00000000
so the high22 bits of the SETHI instructions pointing at .rodata are
set to 0. This, in principle, would let me get rid of most SETHI
instructions, or at least those pointing to the .rodata section for
instance. As an example, I can reduce the code size of a Paranoia
bench by 19% which is huge in the embedded context. However I do not
know if such modification is feasible / possible / already implemented
at the linker level (ld, gold?).

I appreciate any suggestions you could give me to improve this issue.

Best regards,


George