Fumiaki Isoya <iso...@gmail.com> writes: >> It may interest you to know that, for an older Cygnus project (mep), >> we implemented a facility called computed/complex relocations, as an >> ELF extension. This is a way of encoding general symbol/arithmetic >> expressions to be evaluated at link time and substituted into the >> binary output. [...] > > Did you write some compiler language to evaluate that feature?
No. Software for this particular was mainly coded in assembly, and the assembly language / instruction set were itself very configurable(!), so relocations had to be general. If this capability is useful for a higher-level language, a binding would have to be created, and the arch gas/binutils would have to start generating the info. > How is the idea of adopting it as the standard format of GNU Hurd? I have no opinion on this. Note though that these complex relocations are encoded within a standard ELF file (merely using separate relocation-type and symbol-type codes). There is no need for an OS/kernel to support it, since all the action takes place within the assembler and linker. - FChE
