objdump or gdb to force a section to load ?

[Brendan Simon <brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au>]

I sent this a while ago and got no response.  I'm resending it just in case
it got lost.
Sorry if you have already received this before.
Brendan Simon.

Brendan Simon wrote:

> I have a linux kernel compiled for a mpc860 target and am trying to get
> it to run by downloading it into memory using a background debugger
> (BDM).  The boot code gets to the point where it trys to uncompress the
> kernel but fails because the image isn't loaded into memory (only .text,
> .rodata and .data are loaded).  I tried using objcopy to set the "image"
> section to "load" but it does not seem to work.  How can I get gdb to
> load the image section (either using a gdb command or binutils) ?
>
> Here is a before/after trace using objcopy --set-section-flags.  As you
> can see, the load attribute is not set.  I've tried all combinations of
> attributes but I can't get it to work.  Am I doing something wrong ?
>
> powerpc-linux-objdump --section-headers myzimage
> myzimage:     file format elf32-powerpc
> Sections:
> Idx Name          Size      VMA       LMA       File off  Algn
>   0 .text         00004324  00100000  00100000  00010000  2**2
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, CODE
>   1 .rodata       00000460  00104330  00104330  00014330  2**4
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, DATA
>   2 .data         000002f8  00105000  00105000  00015000  2**2
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA
>   3 .bss          0000bbac  00106000  00106000  00016000  2**2
>                   ALLOC
>   4 image         0006ccbf  00000000  00000000  00016000  2**0
>                   CONTENTS, READONLY
>
> powerpc-linux-objcopy --set-section-flags=image=load myzimage
>
> powerpc-linux-objdump --section-headers myzimage
> myzimage:     file format elf32-powerpc
> Sections:
> Idx Name          Size      VMA       LMA       File off  Algn
>   0 .text         00004324  00100000  00100000  00010000  2**2
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, CODE
>   1 .rodata       00000460  00104330  00104330  00014330  2**4
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, DATA
>   2 .data         000002f8  00105000  00105000  00015000  2**2
>                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA
>   3 .bss          0000bbac  00106000  00106000  00016000  2**2
>                   ALLOC
>   4 image         0006ccbf  00000000  00000000  00016000  2**0
>                   CONTENTS