Dear Trent,
In message Pine.LNX.4.58.0908171214470.11911@shell2.speakeasy.net you wrote:
Do you see any want to make this backward compatible with older versions of ld?
I don't have an ld old enough to not like that line so I'm not sure what the problem is exactly.
The problem is that SORT_BY_ALIGNMENT() and SORT_BY_NAME() were introduced for binutils 2.16, so any older versions will barf on the linker scripts.
There wouldn't be any significant downside to changing it to:
*(SORT_BY_ALIGNMENT(.rodata*))
If that would work with your ld. Using *(.rodata*) will result in extra padding and a larger data segment. It may not be all that much extra though...
Differences are minimal, actually.
Please see my approach to solve this at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/66080
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk