There was another problem reported that under some circumstances, jump tables were not being initialized correctly. What was actually happening was a lot more annoying to track down.

The problem was that the ASM_OUTPUT_COMMON macro that I stole from some other archetecture subverted the code used to track the currect segment. The code used to emit text into the assembly file is in varasm.c, in that file is a function called switch_to_section. It is intended to be responsib;e for all section switches. Each time a variable or code block is emitted, switch_to_section checks to see if the intended section is already in use. If not, the directives needed to switch sections are emitted. If the intended section is already in use, nothing happens.

The ASM_OUTPUT_COMMON macro, which outputs a variable in the .bss section, gratuitously emits a "cseg" directive to change the current segment. Later, the switch_to_section code, no knowing a section change has been made, might not do anything. The result is that objects which should be located in the code or data segments are mistakenly being placed in the bss section.

Like so many GCC problems, once the painful task of tacking down the problem is done, fixes are pretty straightforward. Basically, the fix is to use switch_to_section to change sections, like I should have done in the beginning.