Re: SEC_NEVER_LOAD cleanup

[Kai Tietz <ktietz70 at googlemail dot com>]

2010/10/18 Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 08:21:56AM +0200, Kai Tietz wrote:
>> According to pe-coff specification NOLOAD means that a section has
>> neither allocation nor the load flag set. For example .debug* or
>> .metadata sections have this style described in pe-coff specification.
>> They are part of the image without being mapped into process-memory on
>> module load time, but have content and have image-file pointers.
>
> http://osr507doc.sco.com/en/topics/COFF_SectHdrFlags.html disagrees.
> STYP_NOLOAD ? ? 0x02 ? ?Noload section (allocated, relocated, not loaded)
>
> --
> Alan Modra
> Australia Development Lab, IBM
>

Well, the issue for pe-coff is that no-LOAD with ALLOC leads to
uninitialized data, which is used for .bss. But sections with NOLOAD
have content and therefore need INITIALIZED_DATA flag set.
So it makes sense for ELF that a section, which is allocated but not
loaded, to short-cut to write zero-data. But well, the no-load case
should be covered by ELF-loader and not necessarily means that section
must have zero'ed content, or am I wrong here?
For pe-coff the no-load (caused by .bss, which has really no content
stored), but isn't marked as STYP_NOLOAD AFAICS) the no-load should
have still CONTENT.

Kai
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