On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 1:54 AM, vb vb@vsbe.com wrote:
On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Grant Likely grant.likely@secretlab.ca wrote:
The problem is that the u-boot C runtime setup is insane and must be fixed. Fix the C runtime and the problem goes away. The approach being suggested here would have us *preserve* the insane C runtime and actually depend on the runtime to remain insane in order to work.
Grant, thank you for pitching in.
It would be great if you could elaborate what exactly is insane about C runtime setup (especially since in u-boot its code comes from the source tree and not from some obscure compiler dependent library) and how its insanity is related here.
In a sane C runtime, pointers declared in a static variable are usable. Since u-boot's relocation does not fix up the pointers, that means it is insane.
The mechanism exists to do relocation properly. It is in the u-boot code and it conforms to the PowerPC ABI. However, we're not using GCC correctly so we cannot reliably get the relocation data loaded into the .got and .fixup sections. This is all discussed in detail in the u-boot archives (see the gmane search link that Jerry posted at the beginning of this thread).
g.