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RE: gcov and initialized data
> From: Nathan Sidwell [mailto:nathanmsidwell@gmail.com] On Behalf Of
> Nathan Sidwell
> Sent: Thursday, May 3, 2018 1:58 PM
> To: taylor, david; gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: gcov and initialized data
>
> On 05/03/2018 01:09 PM, taylor, david wrote:
>
> > When you build your program for code coverage (-ftest-coverage
> > -fprofile-arcs), GCC creates some initialized read-write GCOV related
> > data. Has anyone modified GCC to, presumably either under control of
> > a command line option or possibly a configure time option, to initialize such
> data at run-time instead of compile-time?
>
> How is this distinct to having to support regular C code such as:
>
> int x = 5;
>
> ? (I'm guessing the simplest solution would be to post-process the statically
> linked image to do some kind of run-length compression on its .data section
> and squirrel that away somewhere that a decompressor can find it early on)
There's a linker script. It sets the size of the .data section to 0. Any attempt to
use initialized read-write data overflows the .data section and fails the build.
> nathan
>
> --
> Nathan Sidwell