mrg@eterna.com.au writes:

> i am in particular interested if the bootblocks work as xxboot had to
> have "-fwriteable-strings" option removed from GCC, and i guess i
> expect there was a good reason for this...

In order to make the xxboot relocatable, all the literal strings,
if any, must be put in the data segment.  Computing address of
an object in text segment causes absolute addressing, which prevents
the program from being relocatable.

I converted all the strings to the assembly code, so this should
not be a problem for now.  This was for someone who modify the code
in the future.

What prevent it being relocatable are
1. literal strings placed in text segment,
2. const objects,
3. initialization of automatic aggregates,
4. function pointers.

1-3 are new features introduced by ANSI C, and we can avoid them
by using traditional C.  However, GNU C deprecated -traditional, augh.
The -writable-strings is (was?) a subset of -traditional, which solves 1.

README.ipl have some notes on this.

Does this satisfy your interest?

-- 
ITOH Yasufumi