position independent code

[Randy Devol]

At 05:24 PM 2/5/99 -0800, Scott Howard wrote:
>Gnu CC does support position independant code with the -fpic and -fPIC
>options.  It is only supported when the compiler & assembler use the ELF
>object file format, it does not work when using COFF (as you have
>already discovered, judging from the listing you enclosed).  ELF for the
>m68k will be supported in a forthcoming release of EGCS.
>
>There is an additional complication: the gnu implementation is designed
>with shared libraries in mind; it creates an address translation table
>which must be 'fixed up' at run time to point to the absolute address of
>functions and variables.  This is not really useful for an embedded
>(diskless, OS-less) system.  This is a more complicated issue, and it
>would take some work to implement for a low-end system (essentially you
>would need a run-time loader of some sort).

I thought that many people were successfully using Gnu tools for embedded
work.  Is this "fix up" feature only included when -fPIC is used?  Or is it
only present with EGCS?  (I don't need position independent code.  In fact,
I want exactly the opposite. :-)


-=O=- Randy

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