Re: [Freemint-discuss] TOS symbol files

[Eero T. <oa...@he...>]

Hi,

On 5.2.2025 15.27, Thorsten Otto via Freemint-discuss wrote:
> On Mittwoch, 5. Februar 2025 13:51:58 CET Eero Tamminen wrote:
>> Yes, those are useful.
 >
> I have removed them from the rom tables, but copied them to separate files,
> since they are always identical. Can easily be prepended to the maps again, so
> hatari only has to deal with one file.

Dropping absolute symbols is fine too.  Code symbols are most useful, 
data ones next and absolute symbol less so, as they are not used by any 
of the builtin debugger functionality, only by debugger users.

Marking system variables symbols as data types may help their use in 
Hatari debugger (I don't remember anymore which places in debugger limit 
symbol types).


>> It would be good for them to have correct type, as absolute symbols are
>> ignored in several contexts,
> 
> Hm ok. So they should be changed to BSS instead. Not a big deal, however they
> are only actually accessed in rare cases (they are used by the seedfill
> algorithm).

Ah, that's a really rarely used function (partly due to its perf).  No 
real loss then...


>> => Remove at least all loop labels, or all local ones if it's more
>> convenient
> 
> Hm, that is going to be difficult. Removing all locals would also remove entry
> points of static functions. And there are lots of them that are not loop
> labels, but rather branch targets for if/else in the assembler sources etc.
> Any idea how to remove them automatically? There are currently 55 files, with
> 3000-4500 labels each.

GCC uses special prefix for local symbols (".L<number>"), so it was easy 
to remove local symbols it generates.

If TOS ones cannot be removed easily in an automated way, they can 
always be left into symbol file and if some of them turn out to be 
noticeably problematic, I guess they can be removed (manually) later on...


>> IHMO symbol files are best to be sorted by address.
> 
> Yes, they are. But those ROMs actually have two data and two text segments,
> and the first data segment is in the middle of the ROM.

I don't think that's a problem, but you could try when Hatari imports it OK.


	- Eero