[U-Boot-Users] .section .bootpg, "ax"

[Jerry Van Baren <gerald.vanbaren@comcast.net>]

Charles Krinke wrote:
> I am puzzled by a statement in various init.S files in ppc near the end of the file. The statement is
> 
> .section .bootpg, "ax"
> 
> I understand ".section" & ".bootpg" as they are describing sections
> for the lds linker file to collect all the .bootpg segments together
> at linker time up near the reset vector.
> 
> But, ... What does the "ax" mean?
> 
> I thank the group in advance for helping me understand.
> 
> Charles

Hi Charles,

The assembler (gas) is hidden in binutils.  Quoting from:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/manual/gas-2.9.1/html_chapter/as_7.html#SEC119>

For ELF targets, the .section directive is used like this:

.section name[, "flags"[, @type]]

The optional flags argument is a quoted string which may contain any 
combintion of the following characters:

a
     section is allocatable
w
     section is writable
x
     section is executable

HTH,
gvb