Rockbox

The iPod linker script contains a trick which causes .data to always be word aligned on disk. The section is not moved by startup code, so it remains word aligned in memory. If the section alignment was more strict, and as a result, more padding had to be added for alignment, .data would be at the wrong address in memory. This leads to a crash at startup.

The linker sets the section alignment to the strictest variable alignment in the section. Currently, nothing is increasing .data section alignment. The problem can only occur if a variable with more strict alignment (eg. CACHEALIGN_ATTR) is added to .data. Here’s one example of how to trigger the problem: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/12391?getfile=24344

This issue seems to be present in multiple targets. The solution should be simple: remove the linker script trick from all targets which don’t have code to copy .data elsewhere. I’m attaching a patch which removes the trick for iPods. I’ll track down the other targets later.

I don’t think the “. = ALIGN(0×4);” lines have any purpose when . is not assigned to any value and the following section’s alignment is respected, but .text has the line, so I’m not removing it from .rodata. I’m not very familiar with linker scripts.