How can compiling the same source code generate different object files?

Question

After a long sequence of debugging I've narrowed my problem down to one file. And the problem is that the file compiles differently in two different directories, when everything else is the same.

I'm using CodeSourcery's arm gcc compiler (gcc version 4.3.3, Sourcery G++ Lite 2009q1-161) to compile a simple file. I was using it in one module with no issues and then I copied it to another module to use there. When it compiles, the object file is significantly different. The command line to compile the two files is identical (I used the linux history to make sure), and the 3 include files are also identical copies (checked with diff).

I did a binary compare on the two object files and they have a lot of individual byte differences scattered around. I did an objdump -D of both and compared them and there are a lot of differences. Here is dump1, dump2, and the diff. The command line is " arm-none-eabi-gcc --std=gnu99 -Wall -O3 -g3 -ggdb -Wextra -Wno-unused -c crc.c -o crc.o".

How is this possible? I've also compiled with -S instead of -c and looked at the assembler output and that's identical except for the directory path. So how can the object file be different?

My real problem is that when I try to link the object file for dump2 into my program, I get undefined reference errors, so something in the object is wrong, whereas the object for dump1 gets no such errors and links fine.

Answer 1

For large scale software, there are many implementations are doing hashing on pointers. This is one major reason that cause result randomization. Usually if the program logic is correct, the order of some internal data structures could be different which is not harmful in most cases.

And also, don't compare the 'objdump -D' output, since your are compiling the code from different directory, the string table, symbol table, DWARF or eh_frame should be different. You will certainly get lots of diff lines.

The only comparison that makes sense is to compare the output of 'objdump -d' which only takes care of the text section. If text section is same(similar) then it can be considered as identical.

Answer 2

Most likely your file picks up different include files. This this the most likely reason.

Check that your include paths are exactly the same, paths in the include statements. They may point to different directories. C and C++ has a feature that when you #include abcd.h it tries to load abcd.h from the directory of the calling file. Check this.