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At 05:24 PM 2/5/99 -0800, Scott Howard wrote:
>Gnu CC does support position independant code with the -fpic and -fPIC
>options. It is only supported when the compiler & assembler use the ELF
>object file format, it does not work when using COFF (as you have
>already discovered, judging from the listing you enclosed). ELF for the
>m68k will be supported in a forthcoming release of EGCS.
>
>There is an additional complication: the gnu implementation is designed
>with shared libraries in mind; it creates an address translation table
>which must be 'fixed up' at run time to point to the absolute address of
>functions and variables. This is not really useful for an embedded
>(diskless, OS-less) system. This is a more complicated issue, and it
>would take some work to implement for a low-end system (essentially you
>would need a run-time loader of some sort).
Even if this is not intentionally built for embedded system, GNU PIC
could be used for it. The loader could be left to the designer, for
instance on a m68k :
start:
....
/* Load the address relative to the PC */
lea (_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_,pc),a5
/* Load the address given by the linker */
movea.l #_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_,a2
/* Then find the offset */
suba.l a5,a2
beq L1 /* Null Offset ? */
/* Add the offset to all of the Global Offset Table */
move.l #gotsize,d1 /* gostize : linker variable */
L0: subq.l #4,d1
blt.b L1 /* End of GOT ? */
movea.l (a5,d1.l),a3 /* Read the GOT */
adda.l a2,a3 /* Add the offset */
move.l a3,(a5,d1.l) /* Write back in the GOT */
bra L0
....
BUT there is a major concern, what if everything is in ROM ? Alas, THE
GOT NEED TO BE IN RAM or, at least, the _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_ pointer.
A solution is to set the _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_ in a fixed position in
RAM via the linker (e.g.: at the top of the stack) and to memorize the
position of the offset table in another variable like
__GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_. You then need to write another loader.
Hope it helps,
--
Olivier Carmona
Research Assistant
IN-F-132, LAMI-EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Tel: ++41(21).693.3908, Fax: ++41(21).693.5263
http://diwww.epfl.ch/lami/team/carmona
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