Re: Porting the linker

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Jc,

> - My architecture has hierarchy memory (basically 3 levels)

Is this sort of like L1 cache, L2 cache and external RAM or something else ?

> - However, technically, I'd have 3 sections for the data (both data
> and bss) and 2 sections for text (1 level of the memory can't have
> text). How do I explain this to the assembler ?

The assembler can support as many sections as you like.  For example the 
.section pseudo-op can be used to create new sections with arbitrary 
names and various different attributes.  Presumably however you want to 
define some "well-known" extra sections that are specific to your port 
of the assembler and which the programmer does not have to specify 
themselves.  This is quite straightforward.  Several ports do it.  For 
example have a look at gas/config/tc-microblaze.c.

> - Knowing that additionally, I'd need to have a system that overflows
> if a smaller level is full

Presumably this is something that you want to happen in the linker, not 
the assembler.

> - Is there a correct way to do this without touching the internals of
> the binutils that I'm missing or do I have to modify a bit it to make
> it compatible to our architecture ?

You are going to have to modify the internals of binutils.  Although 
with luck you should find that all of the changes that you need to make 
can be done via the various target specific hook functions provided by 
bfd and ld.

It feels like your situation is similar to the small data areas 
supported by some architectures.  With most of those however if the 
small area is filled to excess the linker just issues an error message 
and aborts.

Just a thought - it might be easier in the linker to fill the large text 
and data sections first and then, as late as possible, extract portions 
of those sections to go into the smaller text and data sections.

Cheers
  Nick