[U-Boot] ARM relocation, question to Heiko

[Albert ARIBAUD <albert.aribaud@free.fr>]

Le 03/10/2010 01:07, Graeme Russ a ?crit :
> On 03/10/10 08:09, Albert ARIBAUD wrote:
>> Le 02/10/2010 22:39, Reinhard Meyer a ?crit :
>>
>>> And as an idea, if position independent code is used, only pointers
>>> in initialized data need adjustment. Cannot the linker emit a table
>>> of addresses that need fixing?
>>
>> IIU Bill C, yes the linker can emit the information and the startup code
>> could use this information instead of relying on hand-provided info; the
>> linker file probably needs to be modified in order to provide such info.
>> I intend to look into this, but feel free to do too.
>
> As mentioned previously, I have already done this for x86. The linker flags
> used are -pic and --emit-relocs. The linker produces a section named
> rel.dyn which needs to be processed but not loaded into RAM. rel.dyn
> contains a simple list of address (within .text, .data, .rodata etc) each
> of which need a simple adjustment equal to the relocation offset.

Bill just said that -pic (or, for ARM, -fPIC or -fPIE) was unnecessary 
for relocation. You seem to imply it actually is... In my experience, 
-fPIC and-fPIE do increase code by adding GOT relocation to symbols that 
need fixing, so they would indeed be redundant to any other relocation 
mechanism -- I just did some test with basic code and this seems to 
confirm, no -fPIx is needed to get relocation the way you do on ARM.

> The size increase of the code + data loaded into RAM is 104012 bytes to
> 104296 bytes which is only 284 bytes or a mere 0.3% (which is negligible)
> with an additional 22424 bytes in rel.dyn (22%) not loaded into RAM
>
> The additional bonus is that .got is not referenced during run-time, so
> there is no run-time performance penalty. However, the penalty of
> processing 2803 relocation records at startup may not be wholly recovered
> during a typical u-boot run-time session.
>
> All this is for x86, and may not apply so neatly to other arches

Of course. :)

Amicalement,
-- 
Albert.