Dear "J. William Campbell",
In message 4CA75BFB.5030208@comcast.net you wrote:
And I think there are more places of this type in u-boot...
Yes, maybe. But relocation as I did for arm, also works on m68k, sparc, mips, avr32 and they must do also this fixups, so for common functions (except the new env handling, which I think got never tested on this architectures?) should work ...
This pointer problem is solved with the fixup relocs on ppc and should work without manual relocation. I think this is a ppc only extension but I might be wrong.
You are correct that this is a ppc only extension. As such, it isnot a good candidate for "general" use.
On contrary.
If it works for PPC, then there should be ways to do the same on other architectures.
Using the full relocation scheme eliminates the need for all these "fixups" in u-boot C code. I think this is a very desirable result. It is also not clear to me that hard coding in the relocation as several C routines will produce a u-boot that is "smaller" than the one produced by using normal ELF relocation. However, using full relocation creates an environment that is true "C" and does not rely on people remembering that they may have to fix up some parts of their code. It is hard to see much downside in using the full relocation capability provided by Graeme's code.
Agreed. But if we take this path, we need to find an implementation that looks clean and readable.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk