vbcc bss clearing issue

[dalton]

I've been having some trouble with constant data included in my program being cleared already before my program starts running.

So I disassembled to linked executable of my program, and found this piece of code just 5 rows into the program. It is a loop which iterates 0x30 (48) times. Each time clearing one longword.

	MOVE.L	#$00000030,D0
	BEQ.S	LAB_0002
	LEA	__BSSBAS,A0
LAB_0001:
	CLR.L	(A0)+
	SUBQ.L	#1,D0
	BNE.S	LAB_0001
LAB_0002:

Further down the source is the __BSSBAS declaration:

	SECTION S_2,DATA

SECSTRT_2:
	DC.L	$00220063,$41000000
__BSSBAS:
	DS.L	1
_SysBase:
	DS.L	1
_DOSBase:
	DS.L	1
_WBenchMsg:
	DS.L	1
__WBenchMsg:
	DS.L	1
__stdin:
	DS.L	1
__stdout:
	DS.L	1
__stderr:
	DS.L	1
_errno:
	DS.L	1
___stack_usage:
	DS.L	1
___stackLower:
	DS.L	1
___stackPtr:
	DS.L	1


	SECTION S_3,DATA

SECSTRT_3:
	DS.L	1
_GfxBase:
	DS.L	1

There are 12 longwords from __BSSBAS to the end of the section, ie 48 (0x30) bytes.

The clearing loop in the beginning of the program appears to be clearing 4 times the data it should. So it basically goes on to clear some constant data I have included in my program.

Very strange! Is it a bug in vbcc?

VBCC 0.9e

[dalton]

This title of this post is actually not accurate. It's not clearing bss data, it's clearing a normal data section which happens to hold a bss pointer.

Still, I'm pretty confident it's a bug in the m68k-kick13 targets startup.o.
It basically clears a number of longwords instead of that number of bytes.

[phx]

Originally Posted by dalton

The clearing loop in the beginning of the program appears to be clearing 4 times the data it should. So it basically goes on to clear some constant data I have included in my program.

Very strange! Is it a bug in vbcc?

Don't think so. My guess is that you are using an obsolete vlink version for m68k-kick13.

In my startup code source the "move.l #$00000030,d0" is

        move.l  #__BSSLEN,d0

__BSSLEN is a (SAS/C-compatible) linker symbol, which represents the number of long words in the BSS part of a Data-Bss section. There was a bug fix for vlink recently (before the vbcc 0.9f release). From the history file:

- 0.16 (16.05.17)
...
o (ados/ehf): Fixed SAS/C-compatibility linker symbol __BSSLEN. Now it
  represents the number of long words instead of the number of bytes.
  WARNING! Make sure to check your code, if you used __BSSLEN before!

Make sure your vlink is V0.16.

VBCC 0.9e

Hmm. There was no m68k-kick13 target in 0.9e. I first released it with 0.9f (accompanied by the appropriate vlink-version).

[dalton]

I see! It looks like I have mismatched target and linker versions. I've actually been changing back and forth between different compiler/linker versions without considering the targets.
Thanks for your reply!