Questions on initialization model

Zheng Zhao said:

The initialization routine is within the C run-time library? I have never written it, so it must be.

Yes.

Zheng Zhao said:

Regardless of ram_model or rom_model choice, the initialization routine (in boot.obj) is always linked into the .out file?

Use of either --rom_model or --ram_model causes the linker to follow several conventions for linking C code, one of which is that boot.obj being is included in the link.

Zheng Zhao said:

So the difference between load-time initialization and auto- initialization, is only that for load-time initialization cinit -1 is told to the initialization routine, and emulator does its job instead.

Change "emulator" to "loader".  Otherwise, that is correct.

Zheng Zhao said:

And it is also clear from here that this C run-time initialization routine has nothing to do with bootloader, which is for moving sections into memory, rather than initializing its variables. Correct?

Yes.

Thanks and regards,

-George

Zheng Zhao said:

For --ram_model, I think the inclusion boot.obj is optional, and in fact redundant.

boot.obj does more than this, so it is necessary.

Zheng Zhao said:

Do you mean "loader" is a more general concept of which "emulator" is an instance? Are you referring (implicitly) to PC programming, for example, MS Visual Studio could also do the initialization work instead of auto-initialization (boot.obj's MS VC++ equivalent)?

Emulator is a piece of hardware that only knows how to read/write bytes. Loader is PC software that uses emulator and understands out file format.

MS VS (as all compilers do) adds some code that runs before main() starts, but it's not the same code as TI's compiler adds.