TI RTOS examples for GCC compiler generates 512MB bin file

Amit Ashara

Hello RTOS Team

The GCC compiler example for TM4C129x devices generates a out file of size 905KB. However when the GNU Objcopy utility is used to read the out file and generate a bin file with the options -O binary --strip-all then the bin file generated is 512MB.

The same example for ARM Compiler works correctly when we add the out to bin conversion

"${CCE_INSTALL_ROOT}/utils/tiobj2bin/tiobj2bin" "${BuildArtifactFileName}" "${BuildArtifactFileBaseName}.bin" "${CG_TOOL_ROOT}/bin/armofd" "${CG_TOOL_ROOT}/bin/armhex" "${CCE_INSTALL_ROOT}/utils/tiobj2bin/mkhex4bin"

Regards

Amit

over 10 years ago

0 Ashish Kapania over 10 years ago

TI__Mastermind 21645 points

Hi Amit,

Can you share your GCC app's map file and the elf out file ?

Best,
Ashish

0 Amit Ashara over 10 years ago in reply to Ashish Kapania

TI__Guru**** 244440 points

Hello Ashish,

The following post on the TM4C forum has the customer example.

e2e.ti.com/.../473889

Regards
Amit

0 Ashish Kapania over 10 years ago in reply to Amit Ashara

TI__Mastermind 21645 points

Hi Amit,

I believe the issue is that there is a loadable section in RAM and GCC is 0-filling the memory between flash and RAM in order to generate the bin file. Can you ask the customer to mark the ".vtable" section as NOLOAD in the linker script ? The ".vtable" section should get populated at runtime.

Let me know if this fixes the binary size problem.

Best,
Ashish

0 Amit Ashara over 10 years ago in reply to Ashish Kapania

TI__Guru**** 244440 points

Hello Ashish,

Do you mean to replace

.vtable (_vtable_base_address) : AT (_vtable_base_address) {
KEEP (*(.vtable))
} > REGION_DATA

as

.vtable (NOLOAD) : AT (_vtable_base_address) {
KEEP (*(.vtable))
} > REGION_DATA

Regards
Amit

0 Ashish Kapania over 10 years ago in reply to Amit Ashara

TI__Mastermind 21645 points

A little different. Try this:

.vtable (_vtable_base_address) (NOLOAD) : {
    KEEP (*(.vtable))
} > REGION_DATA

Best,

Ashish

0 Amit Ashara over 10 years ago in reply to Ashish Kapania

TI__Guru**** 244440 points

Hello Ashish,

Thanks. It works well now. But what is the impact of having NOLOAD since the Vector Table is relocated to SRAM for run time Interrupt Handlers?

Regards
Amit

0 Ashish Kapania over 10 years ago in reply to Amit Ashara

TI__Mastermind 21645 points

As long as "Hwi.resetVectorAddress" and "Hwi.vectorTableAddress" Hwi module config params are different (they should be different by default), I think it should be harmless to mark ".vtable" section as NOLOAD. This section stores the RAM vector table and will be initialized during startup.

I also filed a CQ (SDOCM00120545) requesting we mark ".vtable" as NOLOAD by default.

Best,
Ashish

0 Amit Ashara over 10 years ago in reply to Ashish Kapania

TI__Guru**** 244440 points

Hello Ashish,

Thanks for the clarification. I have updated our forum post as well.

Regards
Amit

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TI RTOS examples for GCC compiler generates 512MB bin file