Posted on May 17, 2011 at 13:47I can't speak to GCC, but with my old RealView tool chains the linker could take a DEF file containing addresses of code/data in ROM that could be linked against the code going into FLASH/RAM. It could pretty much point to anything, anywhere.
Other than that, you should be able to control the link order, and the sections pieces of code/data are going.
But as Andrew has pointed out, some of this fine grain control is mainly an embedded thing, where you do want to explicitly control where specific sections have to end up in the image, including initialized variables which are tacked at the end of the FLASH/ROM image and copied into RAM by the C runtime.
If you can't do it with the linker, a post link stage which can fixup, patch or checksum, or otherwise package the firmware image is something I would consider.
-Clive
