PIC18F Software Project Survival Guide 3

This is the third installment on a series of post regarding software programming on PIC18F cpu family. You can find the first here and the second here.
Linker
The linker is expected to group together the code from all the different compilation units produced by the compiler and generate the binary code. Since Pic18f architecture is what it is, this is not a trivial task.
Compiler groups data in data sections. These sections may be assigned to a specific region of the data memory via the linker script.
This file is defined for every project and you’d better to familiarize with its syntax.
In fact some troubles may arise by bad linker script and can be fixed by changing the linker script.
For example the compiler uses a temporary data section (named .tmpdata) – to store intermediate expression results – that is free to float around in the data memory. If the linker script is modified without care, then this section may fall across the banks boundary causing wrong computation (in the best case, memory corruption in the worst).
The default project comes with a default linker script that avoids data object to get across bank boundaries. (Note that linker script banks are not data memory banks, but user defined regions of memory, you may want to make linker script banks coincide with data memory banks for avoiding bank switching problems). So, by default, you are protected from this kind of fault (at the cost of some slack space, unless your code is so lucky to fill perfectly all the pages). But when the project size increases your data object will grow as well. So you may be tempted (I was) to merge all the banks into a big one.
I did, then I found many unexpected troubles because of this (see the .tmpdata and C startup problems for example). So I wrote a small awk script to run over the map file to spot these problems:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

/<[[iu]data>/ {
        len=strtonum($5)
        if( len > 0 )
        {
            lastByte=strtonum($3)+len-1
            if( and(lastByte, 0xFFFFFF00) != and(strtonum($3),0xFFFFFF00))
            {
                print "Warning file " $1 " spans over multiple pages (data "
                    "size=" len ")"
            }
        }
    }

From the results I selected those modules that have large data object. I found three large data objects of 360, 600 and 501 bytes respectively. So I modified the linker script to have 3 multi-page banks – 2 banks composed by 2 pages and 1 spanning over 3.
In this way the linker is forced to put big objects in those multi-pages banks, but it will keep all the other objects within a single bank as required.
The best option you have is to start with a default linker script and then merge together adjacent banks as soon as you discover a large data object (this will be reported by an obscure linker error message pointing to a completely innocent module).
The Linker is also very uninformative about errors, you are allowed only to know that you ran out of memory. To be more precise you are allowed to know it only after a training, because the error message is very obscure, something on the lines of “section <a section name you are unaware of> cannot fit some other section”.

Assembler
Since Pic 18 are basically C-unfriendly, some assembly may be required. If you need a little bit of assembly then you can write it directly in the C source code (at a price we’ll see later). If you need some more assembly you want to the separate assembler. In this case you can take full advantage of specific assembly directives and/or macros, but then you lose integration with C language. In fact the assembler cannot fully understand C preprocessor directives, making it impossible to use the same header file for inclusion in both C and assembly.
There are two ways to workaround this, both not very satisfying. First you can write shared header files with the common subset of preprocessor directives shared both by assembly and C. Just keep in mind that rules for searching header file differs.
The other way is to write a filter (more or less complex according to the complexity of your header files) for converting C headers into assembly includes.
I went the last way because it seemed simpler, just convert C comments into assembly language comments, then I modified the filter to resolve include files. I gave up when I tried to switch from #if defined(X) to the old #ifdef X supported by assembler.
Eventually I decided to opt for very basic header files included both from assembly and integrated in more convoluted header file structure for C. I resorted to this solution only because it would take too much time to write a complete filter. If you do this just keep in mind that although comments are not compatible, you can use #if 0/#endif to bracket away parts from both the assembly and the C part.
When you mix assembly and C in the same source file you may get surprising results. As I wrote before I had defined an assert macro to execute a Sleep instruction in order to halt the debugger. My assert was something like:

#define ASSERT(X__) do { if( !(X__) ) { asm_ Sleep endasm_ } } while( false )

The effect is that this inserts the assembly fragment with the Sleep instruction everywhere you want to assert something. I was running short on program memory so I tried several configuration on debugging and optimization options and I discovered a significant difference in memory usage whether asserts where implemented with the assembly fragment or via a function call.
Apparently the optimizer has a hard time in doing its work when an assembly code block is inserted in a C function, no matter what the content of the block is (the sleep instruction has no side effects that can disturb the C code execution).
I think the assert is one of the rare case where you want assembly language not for performance reason. Therefore it is a sort of contradiction – you use assembly language fragment to improve speed, but you kill the C language optimization.
If you need assembly for performance, put it in a specific .asm source file.

Next time I’ll write about the IDE and debugging.

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