Re: how to link a section in specific .o inside .a via linker script?

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Mat,

> Once I have this properly tested I can submit a patch, but I don't
> know if anyone else actually wants this feature.

Well I am sure that there will be people interested in seeing the patch, 
even if it does not get included into the sources.  Remember though, 
that in order for us to consider a patch you would need to have signed a 
FSF copyright assignment for it.  If you just want to tell people about 
it, but not submit it, then maybe posting a URL to it would be a better 
idea.

In the long run however you may find that modifying your tool so that it 
automatically extracts the required object files from the libraries 
would be a better solution.  This way it will then work with any version 
of the GNU linker, not just your patched version(*).

> Admittedly there are messy issues I did not address or think about, like SORT(MEMBER(...)),
> etc.

Mmm, yes.  These would need to be addressed before the patch could be 
accepted.

> P.S. I also needed to change the link map generator to write out the required
>      alignment of each section alongside its address and size information.
>      I wrote it out as a comment to try to be compatible with any tools
>      parsing linker maps, but that's kinda gross. I wonder if anyone
>      else wants the alignment information in a convenient way.

I think that this would be a useful addition to the -Map output.  (It 
might also help spot cases where section alignment is not being handled 
correctly).  For compatibility sakes though, maybe a variant of the -Map 
switch should be used instead.  eg:

  -Map-with-alignments <FILE>

Cheers
  Nick

(*) Modulo the -Map option emitting the section alignment requirements 
of course.