Re: problem with bfd update from 2001/12/17

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 02:40:41AM +0200, Ralf Habacker wrote:
> Hi Alan,
> 
> I have seen, that you have written many things for bfd/ld.
> I like to submit some patches needed for the kde-cygwin port
> http://kde-cygwin.sf.net (some optimations for auto-import stuff and later a
> patch for performance benefits through ordinal linking).
> I have tried to update binutils to the newest cvs release, but this fails.
> Danny Smith has announced this bug in
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/binutils/2002-01/msg00477.html and additional there are
> some current messages on the binutils list.
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/binutils/2002-04/msg00398.html
> 
> I have analysed this bug a little and found, that the import libraries differ.
> The single object files are the same, but in the header there are symbols
> missing (as I can recognize), so that the exported functions (and auto-imported
> data) could not be linked (undefined reference error). (The relating dxxx.o
> objectfiles in the library are ignored).
> 
> Because this bug was introduced by a major change of the bfd section handling, I
> assume, that the bug is located in the bfd code.

I'm fairly certain that it is in PE-specific code.  I analyzed it
before the 2.12 release (and concluded I could not fix it).  There's a
few segments of code in one of the PE-specific files (pe-i386.c?  I
don't remember now) which assumes it can create a new section and have
it automatically be placed right after the current one, and creates
references accordingly.  That assumption was never a good one, and now
it breaks.

Hope that helps.


-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer