CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cgccarmlinker-scripts
Afoxinabox
Afoxinabox

Reputation: 319

arm-none-eabi-gcc: SECTIONS: unclear syntax *<archivename>.a:

I could not find a clear answer to a very specific problem, even after reading several manual pages and guides. I work on a linker script for the tool chain mentioned in the title. During the development I was tying to link a static library (archived, .a) to a location in my RAM. I could not accomplish this task by handling it like a regular .o file as in the following example: 

SECTIONS {
  outputa 0x10000 :
    {
    all.o
    foo.o (.input1)
    }
  outputb :
    {
    foo.o (.input2)
    foo1.o (.input1)
    }
  outputc :
    {
    *(.input1)
    *(.input2)
    }
}

After a long journey, I found a hint in another Question. That lead me to my current solution:

...
    .ramlib : ALIGN(4)
        {
            *liblpcspifilib_M3.a: (*);
        } > RamLoc40  AT>MFlashA512
...

Please note the colon syntax. This will link all contents of liblpcspifilib as a block to the Ram. However without the ":" it won't link anything. Even after I found out how to solve the issue, I could not find any other information about that behaviour.

Can anyone explain this to me?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 136

Answers (1)

Eugene Sh.
Eugene Sh.

Reputation: 18299

For some reason this information is hard to find in the official GNU docs, so I assume it is some kind of extension. Here on page 50 is telling us:

You can also specify files within archives by writing a pattern matching the archive, a colon, then the pattern matching the file, with no whitespace around the colon.

‘archive:file’ matches file within archive
‘archive:’ matches the whole archive
‘:file’ matches file but not one in an archive

Upvotes: 1

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