what does _eprol mean and how is it compututed

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Feb 23), Giorgos Keramidas said:
> On 2007-02-22 04:20, Mayank Kumar <mayank at microsoft.com> wrote:
> > While calling monstartup in crt0.c, _eprol and _etext are passed to
> > monstartup.  _etext means end of segment, what does _eprol mean and
> > how is it computed
> 
> Are you sure you are talking about FreeBSD?
> 
>   build at kobe:/home/build/src$ egrep -r -e '_eprol|_etext' *
>   build at kobe:/home/build/src$
> 
> I don't see any reference to '_eprol' or '_etext' in our source tree,
> and 'monstartup' doesn't really ring any bells.

It's actually "eprol" and "etext", and the source file is crt1.c,
located at /usr/src/lib/csu/<arch>/crt1.c .  The monstartup function
has a manpage that describes its arguments.  eprol is declared via some
__asm__() code in crt1.c to ensure that it's the first symbol in
gcrt1.o's text segment, which ensures that it's the first symbol in a
program's text segment (since gcrt1.o is the first thing linked into a
profiled binary).

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com