Bad Windows PE handling in GHC runtime linker

Playing with -fsplit-sections on Windows I've found a pile of ancient (it was borrowed from Hugs interpreter code and I don't even know when was it created), absolutely redundant and plain wrong code in RTS linker.

Technically it is a bug, but it doesn't break things when used with current Windows binutils with no special linker scripts involved.

OTOH, it slows down runtime linker on Windows noticeably and thus can be considered as a performance bug.

I've attached the patch which fixes this.

The nice side-effect for existing users is that GHCi now loads compiled object code much faster on Windows.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Runtime System (Linker)
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system
Architecture

changed weight to 5

added RTS Tbug Trac import linking labels

Attached file ghc-rts-linker-pe-handling.patch (download).

Good spot as always @awson!

I've put it up on Phabricator for you.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Differential revisions	- → D1773

Thanks!

In fact, this is critical to make -fsplit-sections on Windows work (but this requires to use HEAD binutils and also to patch a couple of bugs there).

mentioned in commit 49e414a7

closed

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Resolution	Unresolved → ResolvedFixed

added Pnormal label