This patch adds a new pragma for functions and globals to set the
section name. This can be useful to place a function or global in a
special device specific section, for example:
* Functions may be placed in RAM to make them run faster, or in flash
(if RAM is the default) to not let them take up RAM.
* DMA memory may only be placed in a special memory area.
* Some RAM may be faster than other RAM, and some globals may be
performance critical thus placing them in this special RAM area can
help.
* Some (large) global variables may need to be placed in external RAM,
which can be done by placing them in a special section.
To use it, you have to place a function or global in a special section,
for example:
//go:section .externalram
var externalRAMBuffer [1024]byte
This can then be placed in a special section of the linker script, for
example something like this:
.bss.extram (NOLOAD) : {
*(.externalram)
} > ERAM
Unfortunately, the .rodata section can't be stored in flash. Instead, an
explicit .progmem section should be used, which is supported in LLVM as
address space 1 but not exposed to normal programs.
Eventually a pass should be written that converts trivial const globals
of which all loads are visible to be in addrspace 1, to get the benefits
of storing those globals directly in ROM.
This can be useful to test improvements in LLVM master and to make it
possible to support LLVM 11 for the most part already before the next
release. That also allows catching LLVM bugs early to fix them upstream.
Note that tests do not yet pass for this LLVM version, but the TinyGo
compiler can be built with the binaries from apt.llvm.org (at the time
of making this commit).
