Go forward to as Sections.
Go backward to Secs Background.
Go up to Sections.
ld Sections
===========
`ld' deals with just four kinds of sections, summarized below.
*named sections*
*text section*
*data section*
These sections hold your program. `as' and `ld' treat them as
separate but equal sections. Anything you can say of one section
is true another. When the program is running, however, it is
customary for the text section to be unalterable. The text
section is often shared among processes: it will contain
instructions, constants and the like. The data section of a
running program is usually alterable: for example, C variables
would be stored in the data section.
*bss section*
This section contains zeroed bytes when your program begins
running. It is used to hold unitialized variables or common
storage. The length of each partial program's bss section is
important, but because it starts out containing zeroed bytes there
is no need to store explicit zero bytes in the object file. The
bss section was invented to eliminate those explicit zeros from
object files.
*absolute section*
Address 0 of this section is always "relocated" to runtime address
0. This is useful if you want to refer to an address that `ld'
must not change when relocating. In this sense we speak of
absolute addresses being "unrelocatable": they don't change during
relocation.
*undefined section*
This "section" is a catch-all for address references to objects
not in the preceding sections.
An idealized example of three relocatable sections follows. The
example uses the traditional section names `.text' and `.data'. Memory
addresses are on the horizontal axis.
+-----+----+--+
partial program # 1: |ttttt|dddd|00|
+-----+----+--+
text data bss
seg. seg. seg.
+---+---+---+
partial program # 2: |TTT|DDD|000|
+---+---+---+
+--+---+-----+--+----+---+-----+~~
linked program: | |TTT|ttttt| |dddd|DDD|00000|
+--+---+-----+--+----+---+-----+~~
addresses: 0 ...