How can I have ld add symbols pointing to a section?

Question

I have some variables in my C code that are declared with __attribute__((section(".data.mystuff"))). I would like to define two symbols, mystuff_start and mystuff_size that have the position and size of the section. It looks like ld's LOADADDR and SIZEOF will do what I want, but I don't want to write the whole linker script. I can't figure out how to use INSERT AFTER to do what I want either.

Answer 1

The easiest thing to do is to put them into a section that has a valid C identifier as it's name. For example, use:

__attribute__((section("mystuff")))

and you'll have automagic variables __start_mystuff and __stop_mystuff which will give you the start and end addresses of the section which you can declare in your source as extern variables.

EDIT: this is completely GCC specific!