ARM pc-relative loads

[Richard Sandiford]

Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com> writes:
> The patch below fixes a failure observed building a hacked-up variant of the 
> linux kernel.
>
> The assembler is failing to resolve a pc-relative Thumb load from a global 
> symbol in the same section.  My first guess was that this is a feature - 
> symbol preemption requires the address be resolved at dynamic link time.  
> However the offset range of pc-relative load instructions is sufficiently 
> small that I don't believe that symbol preemption would ever actually succeed 
> in practice.
>
> We already resolve the equivalent ARM relocation. Arguably this is a bug. 
> However there is code that relies on this behavior. Given the uselessness of 
> exporting these relocations I've chosen to go for consistency with ARM LDR, 
> and resolve the relocation.  Further investigation revealed a handful of other 
> load instructions that also need to be handled.

FWIW, just to add to Richard's response, he explicitly rejected the change
in this thread:

    http://sources.redhat.com/ml/binutils/2011-02/msg00398.html
    http://sources.redhat.com/ml/binutils/2011-03/msg00019.html

Richard