What does this GCC error "... relocation truncated to fit..." mean?
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 "fft2d_host" ./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?
Answer
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.