(Layout::add_comdat): Removed.
* layout.h (struct Kept_section): Move out of class Layout.
Remove trailing underscores from field names. Add group_sections
field. Rename group_ field to is_group. Change all uses.
(class Layout): Declare find_or_add_kept_section, not add_comdat.
* object.cc (Sized_relobj::Sized_relobj): Don't initialize
comdat_groups_ field.
(Sized_relobj::include_section_group): Use
find_or_add_kept_section and Kept_section::group_sections.
(Sized_relobj::include_linkonce_section): Likewise.
* object.cc (class Sized_relobj): Don't define Comdat_group or
Comdat_group_table. Remove find_comdat_group and
add_comdat_group. Remove comdat_groups_ field.
* plugin.cc (include_comdat_group): Use
Layout::find_or_add_kept_section.
gold is an ELF linker. It is intended to have complete support for
ELF and to run as fast as possible on modern systems. For normal use
it is a drop-in replacement for the older GNU linker.
gold is part of the GNU binutils. See ../binutils/README for more
general notes, including where to send bug reports.
gold was originally developed at Google, and was contributed to the
Free Software Foundation in March 2008. At Google it was designed by
Ian Lance Taylor, with major contributions by Cary Coutant, Craig
Silverstein, and Andrew Chatham.
The existing GNU linker manual is intended to be accurate
documentation for features which gold supports. gold supports most of
the features of the GNU linker for ELF targets. Notable
omissions--features of the GNU linker not currently supported in
gold--are:
* MEMORY regions in linker scripts
* MRI compatible linker scripts
* cross-reference reports (--cref)
* position independent executables (-pie)
* various other minor options
Notes on the code
=================
These are some notes which may be helpful to people working on the
source code of gold itself.
gold is written in C++. It is a GNU program, and therefore follows
the GNU formatting standards as modified for C++. Source documents in
order of decreasing precedence:
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/17_intro/C++STYLE
http://www.zembu.com/eng/procs/c++style.html
The linker is intended to have complete support for cross-compilation,
while still supporting the normal case of native linking as fast as
possible. In order to do this, many classes are actually templates
whose parameter is the ELF file class (e.g., 32 bits or 64 bits). The
C++ code is the same, but we don't pay the execution time cost of
always using 64-bit integers if the target is 32 bits. Many of these
class templates also have an endianness parameter: true for
big-endian, false for little-endian.
The linker is multi-threaded. The Task class represents a single unit
of work. Task objects are stored on a single Workqueue object. Tasks
communicate via Task_token objects. Task_token objects are only
manipulated while holding the master Workqueue lock. Relatively few
mutexes are used.
Build requirements
==================
The gold source code uses templates heavily. Building it requires a
recent version of g++. g++ 4.0.3 is known to work. g++ 3.2 and g++
3.4.3 are known to fail.
The linker script parser uses features which are only in newer
versions of bison. bison 2.3 is known to work. bison 1.26 is known
to fail. If you are building gold from an official binutils release,
the bison output should already be included.