Hi,
I would like to have your suggestions on how to achieve the following in the simplest, cleanest way.
I have images A and B (and possibly C, D, ... ) to be loaded in physical memory one after the other. Each have .text, .data, .bss sections. B should be linked at the next page after A ends (so it must know where A ends at its link time), also the code in A, should be able to know/discover where B is going to be loaded and where it ends at its runtime.
My possible solutions:
1) If I build A and B as separate images, by first building and linking A, the page at which B would start (i.e. the next page after A) can be determined. I can easily filter objdump output for A to find out where it ends, and include B's start address in B's linker script before building it. But I have already built A, so there's the problem of patching A's image to insert B's start and end address somewhere, and this might be tedious.
2) I could link the two together using a single linker script. Then where each image is loaded would be determined at link time, and each image can be aware of where the other is, by simply reading linker-defined variables. The problem with this is these are actually two different images, objects in them have no relation, also each needs to have its own _start address, so that will probably be ambiguous. Furthermore, I may need to have images C, D and more. So it would quickly get tedious to maintain a single linker script for multiple images meant to be independent.
3) After all images are built, I could compile a data structure with all image information, and load that in a predefined region in memory. At runtime image A or whoever image wants to discover about the others would read this structure from a predefined location.
Do you have any cleaner, simpler solutions?
Many thanks, Bahadir