Re: Mint Technical Questions.........

[P.B.Schuller@WI.LeidenUniv.NL (Bart Schuller)]

>   Question #2
>   -----------
>   I have examined dld-3.2.3 from prep.ai.mit.edu and it includes
>   support for the atarist.  I built it.  But if I try to compile the
>   tests using gcc -fpic it fails at the link stage complaining that
>   _GLOBAL_OFFSET (sp?) is not defined.  Does anyone understand this?
>   Is this a problem with dld or gcc or mint or what?
> 
> The dld port was done quite a long time ago for plain TOS, not MiNT.
> I don't believe anyone has been keeping the Atari support up to date.

Well, I have...
Looking at the code I think this version has never worked on the ST.
Last year I made it work, the result is a patch to dld-3.2.3:
ftp.twi.tudelft.nl/pub/atari/dld-3.2.3-atari.diff.gz

It includes a compile-time switch to choose between GST-style symbol
names in the executable or a separate .sym file (made with sym-ld). The
latter style is needed when you use very long symbol names.

>   Alternatively if -fpic is not what should be used (maybe -mpcrel
>   or -mbaserel) how can I get this to work.  Dynamic linking is
>   something that would be VERY advantageous, especially for perl5
>   and python etc.
>   
> Yes, dynamic linking would be nice. More work needs to be done, whether with
> dld or some other tools, to get it going in MiNT.

Dld gives you dynamic linking, but no sharing (btw, dld doesn't use
-fpic). I don't know if the atari gcc still supports -fpic. PIC also
needs a tool to generate the Global Offset Table. Could the linker from
binutils do that?

Bart.