Hello, everyone.
some sections like .data are set to 16 bytes alignment in the
binutils/gas/config/tc-mips.c as bellows.
(void) bfd_set_section_alignment (stdoutput, text_section, 4);
But in other architectures like arm, .data section is aligned to 4
bytes alignment,
and now I test the object file generated by gas, and found that the
size of .data section sometimes is a little bigger than the situation
of 4 bytes alignments because of the amount of padding.
There are some comments in the tc-mips.c as bellows:
On a native system other than VxWorks, sections must be aligned
to 16 byte boundaries. When configured for an embedded ELF
target, we don't bother.
I want to know whether some mips architecture requires that the
sections of elf object file specifies to be aligned to 16 bytes, or
else 16-bytes alignment will get a good performance than other
alignments just like 4 bytes????
I recompiled the binutils by changing the alignment to 4 bytes, and
compiled some
test files, and ran on my mips target(TX4937). There is no problem.
I am really puzzled and any help will be appreciated.
robertsong
