What does this GCC error "... relocation truncated to fit..." mean?

Question

I am programming the host side of a host-accelerator system. The host runs on the PC under Ubuntu Linux and communicates with the embedded hardware via a USB connection. The communication is performed by copying memory chunks to and from the embedded hardware's memory.

On the board's memory there is a memory region which I use as a mailbox where I write and read the data. The mailbox is defined as a structure and I use the same definition to allocate a mirror mailbox in my host space.

I used this technique successfully in the past so now I copied the host Eclipse project to my current project's workspace, and made the appropriate name changes. The strange thing is that when building the host project I now get the following message:

Building target: fft2d_host
Invoking: GCC C Linker
gcc -L/opt/adapteva/esdk/tools/host/x86_64/lib -o "fft2d_host" ./src/fft2d_host.o -le_host -lrt

./src/fft2d_host.o: In function `main':

fft2d_host.c:(.text+0x280): relocation truncated to fit: R_X86_64_PC32 against symbol `Mailbox' defined in COMMON section in ./src/fft2d_host.o

What does this error mean and why it won't build on the current project, while it is OK with the older project?

Answer 1

You are attempting to link your project in such a way that the target of a relative addressing scheme is further away than can be supported with the 32-bit displacement of the chosen relative addressing mode. This could be because the current project is larger, because it is linking object files in a different order, or because there's an unnecessarily expansive mapping scheme in play.

This question is a perfect example of why it's often productive to do a web search on the generic portion of an error message - you find things like this:

http://www.technovelty.org/code/c/relocation-truncated.html

Which offers some curative suggestions.