A linker script is used to instruct the linker about how to assemble the various sections into a completed binary. It consists of a series of directives which are considered in the order they are encountered.
The sections will appear in the resulting binary in the order they are specified in the script file. If a referenced section is not found, the linker will behave as though the section did exist but had a zero size, no relocations, and no exports. A section should only be referenced once. Any subsequent references will have an undefined effect.
All numbers are in linking scripts are specified in hexadecimal. All directives are case sensitive although the hexadecimal numbers are not.
A section name can be specified as a "*", then any section not already matched by the script will be matched. The "*" can be followed by a comma and a flag to narrow the section down slightly, also. If the flag is "!bss", then any section that is not flagged as a bss section will be matched. If the flag is "bss", then any section that is flagged as bss will be matched.
The following directives are understood in a linker script.
name load addr
This causes the section name to load at
addr. For the raw target, only one "load at" entry is
allowed for non-bss sections and it must be the first one. For raw targets,
it affects the addresses the linker assigns to symbols but has no other
affect on the output. bss sections may all have separate load addresses but
since they will not appear in the binary anyway, this is okay.
For the decb target, each "load" entry will cause a new "block" to be output to the binary which will contain the load address. It is legal for sections to overlap in this manner - the linker assumes the loader will sort everything out.
name
This will cause the section name to load after the previously listed
section.
addr or symThis will cause the execution address (entry point) to be the address specified (in hex) or the specified symbol name. The symbol name must match a symbol that is exported by one of the object files being linked. This has no effect for targets that do not encode the entry point into the resulting file. If not specified, the entry point is assumed to be address 0 which is probably not what you want. The default link scripts for targets that support this directive automatically starts at the beginning of the first section (usually "init" or "code") that is emitted in the binary.
sizeThis will cause the output file to be padded with NUL bytes to be exactly
size bytes in length. This only makes sense for a raw target.