Possible bug in ld with NOLOAD sections.

[Tony Breeds <tony at bakeyournoodle dot com>]

Hello All,
	Please forgive me If I ramble a little or if I should have reported
this elsewhere  I wanted to be sure it was a bug rather then a silly mistake on
my part.

A little background.

I'm trying to include a section in an ELF executable but NOT have that section
covered by the PT_LOAD.  Looking at the binutils docs (and if I have understood
the correctly) I should be able to mark that section 'NOLOAD' to achieve that
behaviour.  However, it seems when I do that the section I'm interested in is
completely omitted from the linked ELF.

I've included a Makefile that demonstrates what I'm doing.

It creates a 4k "blob" of data in the ".blob" section (blob.o), and then links
that into main (without NOLOAD), and also into main-noload.  As you can see
from the ls output below main-noload is substantially smaller than main.

The blob.test (and blob.test-noload) are the results of trying to:
	objcopy -O binary -j .blob main (and main-noload)

I've tried the with a few distro binutils and a CVS checkout and I get the same
behaviour.

---
ls -l lds lds-noload blob.o main main-noload blob.test blob.test-noload 
-rw-rw-r--. 1 tony tony 5528 2009-11-18 14:27 blob.o
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 tony tony 4096 2009-11-18 14:27 blob.test
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 tony tony    0 2009-11-18 14:27 blob.test-noload
-rw-rw-r--. 1 tony tony 6931 2009-11-18 14:27 lds
-rw-rw-r--. 1 tony tony 6940 2009-11-18 14:27 lds-noload
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 tony tony 6120 2009-11-18 14:27 main
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 tony tony 2012 2009-11-18 14:27 main-noload
---

So:
1) Am I interpreting what NOLOAD is supposed to do correctly?
2) Have I done something silly or should I open a bugzilla?
3) What else can I do to help?

Yours Tony


-----
SHELL		=	/bin/bash
BUILDROOT	=	/home/tony/projects/binutils/obj
CC		=	gcc
CFLAGS		=	-Wall -Werror -Wextra -O0 -g
LD		=	$(BUILDROOT)/ld/ld-new
LD		=	ld
LDFLAGS		=	

all: lds lds-noload blob.o main main-noload blob.test blob.test-noload
	ls -l $^ 

main.c: Makefile
	echo 'int main(void) { return 0; }' > $@

blob.c: Makefile
	echo 'static unsigned char blob[4096] __attribute__((section(".blob"), used)) = { [0 ... 4095] = 0xff };' > $@

main: blob.o main.o 
	$(LD) -T lds -o $@ $^

lds: Makefile
	$(LD) --verbose | \
		sed -e '0,/===/ d ; /===/ d' \
		    -e '/__bss_start/ i .blob : { *(.blob) }' >$@

blob.test: main
	objcopy -O binary -j .blob $< $@

main-noload: blob.o main.o 
	$(LD) -T lds-noload -o $@ $^

lds-noload: Makefile
	$(LD) --verbose | \
		sed -e '0,/===/ d ; /===/ d' \
		    -e '/__bss_start/ i .blob (NOLOAD) : { *(.blob) }' >$@

blob.test-noload: main-noload
	objcopy -O binary -j .blob $< $@

.PHONY: clean
clean:
	-$(RM) main* empty* blob* lds*
-----