What does this GCC error relocation truncated to fit mean

Question

I am programming the host side of a host-accelerator system  The host runs on the PC under Ubuntu Linux and communicates with the embedded hardware via a USB connection  The communication is performed by copying memory chunks to and from the embedded hardware s memory  On the board s memory there is a memory region which I use as a mailbox where I write and read the data  The mailbox is defined as a structure and I use the same definition to allocate a mirror mailbox in my host space  I used this technique successfully in the past so now I copied the host Eclipse project to my current project s workspace  and made the appropriate name changes  The strange thing is that when building the host project I now get the following message   Building target  fft2d host Invoking  GCC C Linker gcc -L opt adapteva esdk tools host x86 64 lib -o  quot fft2d host quot     src fft2d host o   -le host -lrt   src fft2d host o  In function  main   fft2d host c   text 0x280   relocation truncated to fit  R X86 64 PC32 against symbol  Mailbox  defined in COMMON section in   src fft2d host o  What does this error mean and why it won t build on the current project  while it is OK with the older project

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On Cygwin -mcmodel medium is already default and doesn t help  To me adding -Wl --image-base -Wl 0x10000000 to GCC linker did fixed the error

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Minimal example that generates the error  main S moves an address into  eax  32-bit    main S   start      mov   start   eax   linker ld  SECTIONS          This says where   text  will go in the executable             0x100000000       text                                Compile on x86-64   as -o main o main S ld -o main out -T linker ld main o   Outcome of ld     text 0x1   relocation truncated to fit  R X86 64 32 against   text    Keep in mind that    as puts everything on the  text if no other section is specified ld uses the  text as the default entry point if ENTRY  Thus  start is the very first byte of  text    How to fix it  use this linker ld instead  and subtract 1 from the start   SECTIONS           0xFFFFFFFF       text                                Notes    we cannot make  start global in this example with  global  start  otherwise it still fails  I think this happens because global symbols have alignment constraints  0xFFFFFFF0 works   TODO where is that documented in the ELF standard  the  text segment also has an alignment constraint of p align    2M  But our linker is smart enough to place the segment at 0xFFE00000  fill with zeros until 0xFFFFFFFF and set e entry    0xFFFFFFFF  This works  but generates an oversized executable    Tested on Ubuntu 14 04 AMD64  Binutils 2 24   Explanation  First you must understand what relocation is with a minimal example  https   stackoverflow com a 30507725 895245  Next  take a look at objdump -Sr main o   0000000000000000  lt  start gt      0    b8 00 00 00 00          mov     0x0  eax                         1  R X86 64 32   text   If we look into how instructions are encoded in the Intel manual  we see that    b8 says that this is a mov to  eax 0 is an immediate value to be moved to  eax  Relocation will then modify it to contain the address of  start    When moving to 32-bit registers  the immediate must also be 32-bit   But here  the relocation has to modify those 32-bit to put the address of  start into them after linking happens   0x100000000 does not fit into 32-bit  but 0xFFFFFFFF does  Thus the error   This error can only happen on relocations that generate truncation  e g  R X86 64 32  8 bytes to 4 bytes   but never on R X86 64 64   And there are some types of relocation that require sign extension instead of zero extension as shown here  e g  R X86 64 32S  See also  https   stackoverflow com a 33289761 895245  R AARCH64 PREL32  Asked at  How to prevent  quot main o   eh frame 0x1c   relocation truncated to fit  R AARCH64 PREL32 against   text  39  quot  when creating an aarch64 baremetal program

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I ran into the exact same issue  After compiling without the -fexceptions build flag  the file compiled with no issue

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You are attempting to link your project in such a way that the target of a relative addressing scheme is further away than can be supported with the 32-bit displacement of the chosen relative addressing mode   This could be because the current project is larger  because it is linking object files in a different order  or because there s an unnecessarily expansive mapping scheme in play    This question is a perfect example of why it s often productive to do a web search on the generic portion of an error message - you find things like this   http   www technovelty org code c relocation-truncated html  Which offers some curative suggestions

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Remember to tackle error messages in order  In my case  the error above this one was  undefined reference   and I visually skipped over it to the more interesting  relocation truncated  error  In fact  my problem was an old library that was causing the  undefined reference  message  Once I fixed that  the  relocation truncated  went away also

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Often  this error means your program is too large  and often it s too large because it contains one or more very large data objects   For example   char large array 1ul  lt  lt  31   int other global  int main void    return other global      will produce a  relocation truncated to fit  error on x86-64 Linux  if compiled in the default mode and without optimization    If you turn on optimization  it could  at least theoretically  figure out that large array is unused and or that other global is never written  and thus generate code that doesn t trigger the problem    What s going on is that  by default  GCC uses its  small code model  on this architecture  in which all of the program s code and statically allocated data must fit into the lowest 2GB of the address space    The precise upper limit is something like 2GB - 2MB  because the very lowest 2MB of any program s address space is permanently unusable   If you are compiling a shared library or position-independent executable  all of the code and data must still fit into two gigabytes  but they re not nailed to the bottom of the address space anymore    large array consumes all of that space by itself  so other global is assigned an address above the limit  and the code generated for main cannot reach it   You get a cryptic error from the linker  rather than a helpful  large array is too large  error from the compiler  because in more complex cases the compiler can t know that other global will be out of reach  so it doesn t even try for the simple cases   Most of the time  the correct response to getting this error is to refactor your program so that it doesn t need gigantic static arrays and or gigabytes of machine code   However  if you really have to have them for some reason  you can use the  medium  or  large  code models to lift the limits  at the price of somewhat less efficient code generation   These code models are x86-64-specific  something similar exists for most other architectures  but the exact set of  models  and the associated limits will vary    On a 32-bit architecture  for instance  you might have a  small  model in which the total amount of code and data was limited to something like 224 bytes

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I ran into this problem while building a program that requires a huge amount of stack space  over 2 GiB    The solution was to add the flag -mcmodel medium  which is supported by both GCC and Intel compilers

[c] What does this GCC error "... relocation truncated to fit..." mean?

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