Re: Section symbols not getting created. Bug? Is attached patch correct fix?

[John Marino <binutils at marino dot st>]

Alan Modra wrote:
>> Well, I think this is a case where the baby was thrown out with the
>> bath water.  I would have thought that backwards capability would
>> have been provided with this change.
>
> I don't recall anyone else complaining, and the change happened four
> years ago.

I don't know how to respond to that.  It was a big change, one that 
ended up causing breaks, thus I would have expected backwards capability 
even if it were apparently unnecessary until now.

>
>> Regarding the internal flag / .em suggestion, isn't that more or
>> less equivalent to the patch on ldlang.c I provided earlier?
>> Basically it would revert the behavior to work as binutils 2.17?
>
> Yes, but based on a flag, only set for your particular target.
>

"Target" means the thing getting linked?  I assume you meant anything 
linked on a DragonFly OS.  My modification to switch behavior based on 
the -shared / -Bshareable command-line switch seems to working so far.


> I do think that asking for __start_* and __stop_* to always be defined
> for orphan sections is a rather odd requirement.  What exactly do you
> need them for?  Surely not the dynamic loader?
>

The kernel loader is using them.  The file provided as a test case of 
the related bug report is a kernel module.  It's beyond me, but I guess 
the loader is looking for these sections.


Thanks,
John