Posting again with the proper subject title - For our MIPS cross-compiler, gcc version is 4.2.0 binutils version is 2.17.90. When our application tries to link with third-party library, the MIPS linker reports failure as "ld: Bad value" The library is not available to us. Since the linking passes after applying the patches given by Richard Sandiford at http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2008-06/msg00270.html , we figured that the error has something to do with multigot feature. The description of the patch is difficult for us to understand. We want to reproduce the failure with a test program. As a first step, we are are trying to access many extern symbols from main(). But when the GOT table size exceeds 64 Kb, the linker fails with message such as : "relocation truncated to fit: R_MIPS_GOT16 against `global_variable__d13155'" With less than 64 Kb GOT , I can see that the binary is in multigot mode. (Each function's prolog is assigning a different value for gp reg. ) a) In multigot mode, why should linker fail to create larger-than-64Kb GOT ? The very purpose of multigot is to overcome this limit, isn't it ? b) I looked at another application built in our company with same toolchain. Its GOT is 188 Kb in size. (There are about 33000 extern symbol entries in the GOT .) I looked at its linking options and did not find anything special. I looked at its binary. It is NOT in xgot mode. Any clues ? c) For the above binary mentioned in , I can see lot of relocation entries in .rel.dyn for the GOT table fixup. From what I know, in MIPS, reloc entries are not needed for GOT relocation. Why would the linker output those for this binary? d) I want to understand the ld test-suite (/toolchain/testsuite/binutils/testsuite/ld/ld-mips-elf) Is there any writeup somewhere ? thanks a lot shankar
