bss section end address is less than start address

Question

I am looking at ARC processor map file and found a section which end address is less than start address.

Is this normal or a bug in the linker script or other issues?

Section name         type     start addr    end addr    length
RM0_SECTION          bss       00040000    0003ffff     00000000

Answer 1

This is a normal behavior.
The formula to comply with is the following:

length = "end addr" - "start addr" + 1

So:
- if the section is not empty, end addr corresponds to the last address that belongs to the section.
- if the section is empty, end addr equals start addr - 1, which means that end addr is NOT an end address in this case, as you observed for RM0_SECTION.