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| <title>LD: Orphan Sections</title> |
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| <h4 class="subsection">3.10.4 Orphan Sections</h4> |
| <a name="index-orphan"></a> |
| <p>Orphan sections are sections present in the input files which |
| are not explicitly placed into the output file by the linker |
| script. The linker will still copy these sections into the |
| output file, but it has to guess as to where they should be |
| placed. The linker uses a simple heuristic to do this. It |
| attempts to place orphan sections after non-orphan sections of the |
| same attribute, such as code vs data, loadable vs non-loadable, etc. |
| If there is not enough room to do this then it places |
| at the end of the file. |
| </p> |
| <p>For ELF targets, the attribute of the section includes section type as |
| well as section flag. |
| </p> |
| <p>If an orphaned section’s name is representable as a C identifier then |
| the linker will automatically see <a href="PROVIDE.html#PROVIDE">PROVIDE</a> two symbols: |
| __start_SECNAME and __stop_SECNAME, where SECNAME is the name of the |
| section. These indicate the start address and end address of the |
| orphaned section respectively. Note: most section names are not |
| representable as C identifiers because they contain a ‘<samp>.</samp>’ |
| character. |
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