Strange additional data in text section of arm-coff object files

["David Lin" <graylag at iii dot org dot tw>]

Hi, everybody

 

There is something strange about the COFF file generated by arm-coff tools

I built an environment for building COFF files on target machine with ARM processor

As the manual of ld descriped, executable object codes could be generated

and relocatable object files could also be created with additional flag '-r'

 

for example:

 

arm-coff-gcc -c init.c

arm-coff-gcc -c hello.c

arm-coff-ld -e _hello -o hello_cof.o hello.o init.o

arm-coff-ld -r -e _hello -o hello_rel.o hello.o init.o

 

 

By observing the executable COFF file hello_cof.o and relocatable file hello_rel.o,

there is surely something different

 

Concerning the text section only,

I found size of text in  hello_cof.o is 16-byte more than size in hello_rel.o

content of these 16 bytes of data is "FFFFFFFF 00000000 FFFFFFFF 00000000"

 

On the experience of prevous work, it is similiar to the m68k case, the cross-platform tools for Motorola 68k processors

size of text section in executable object files is also 16 byte more than in relocatable ones

content of these 16 bytes of data, however, is "00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000"

 

does this circumstance imply something?

I am interested in it :)

 

Here is my experimental environment

 

CPU: Intel Pentium 755

OS: MS Windows 98

Environment: cygwin 1.3.3-1

version of binutils: 2.11.90 (with BFD 2.11.90)

version of gcc: 2.95.3-4 (cygwin special)

version of newlib: 1.9.0

target: arm-coff