detection of memory section overflow in ld - gcc

Question

I have a microcontroller project using the GCC tool chain.
gcc version 4.7.4 20130913 (release) [ARM/embedded-4_7-branch revision 202601]
The controller has 512k flash memory. The first 64k are occupied by the bootloader and 448k remain for the project. I defined a linker script with the sizes for FLASH and RAM. I also added the sections. Here is an excerpt:
MEMORY
{
FLASH (rx) : ORIGIN = 0x00010000, LENGTH = 448K
RAM (xrw) : ORIGIN = 0x10000000, LENGTH = 64K
}
SECTIONS
{
.text :
{
. = ALIGN(4);
*(.text) /* .text sections (code) */
} > FLASH
.fini_array :
{
PROVIDE_HIDDEN (__fini_array_start = .);
KEEP (*(.fini_array*))
PROVIDE_HIDDEN (__fini_array_end = .);
_eflash = .;
} >FLASH
/* used by the startup to initialize data */
_sidata = .;
.data : AT ( _sidata )
{
*(.data) /* .data sections */
*(.data*) /* .data* sections */
_edata = .; /* define a global symbol at data end */
} >RAM
}
The linker works fine placing all section at their places. The problem is that the linker does not check if there is enough space for the .data and .data* sections in the FLASH at the location _sidata. The resulting output exceeds the memory size without any warning.
How can I adapt the linker script so that ld will use the initialization data (.data) in the size calculation?
Edit: Is there any command line option to enforce a sensible data placement?

Answer 1

This linker malfunction can be revealed with an ASSERT:
/* used by the startup to initialize data */
_sidata = .;
.data : AT ( _sidata )
{
_sdata = .;
*(.data) /* .data sections */
*(.data*) /* .data* sections */
_edata = .; /* define a global symbol at data end */
} >RAM
/* verify that the initialization data fits in FLASH */
ASSERT(
(_sidata + (_edata - _sdata)) <= (ORIGIN(FLASH) + LENGTH(FLASH)),
"Initialization Data blow up")
}