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 - <a name="BFD-information-loss"></a>
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 - Next: <a href="Canonical-format.html#Canonical-format" accesskey="n" rel="next">Canonical format</a>, Up: <a href="What-BFD-Version-2-Can-Do.html#What-BFD-Version-2-Can-Do" accesskey="u" rel="up">What BFD Version 2 Can Do</a>   [<a href="index.html#SEC_Contents" title="Table of contents" rel="contents">Contents</a>][<a href="BFD-Index.html#BFD-Index" title="Index" rel="index">Index</a>]</p>
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 - <a name="Information-Loss"></a>
 - <h4 class="subsection">1.3.1 Information Loss</h4>
 - 
 - <p><em>Information can be lost during output.</em> The output formats
 - supported by BFD do not provide identical facilities, and
 - information which can be described in one form has nowhere to go in
 - another format. One example of this is alignment information in
 - <code>b.out</code>. There is nowhere in an <code>a.out</code> format file to store
 - alignment information on the contained data, so when a file is linked
 - from <code>b.out</code> and an <code>a.out</code> image is produced, alignment
 - information will not propagate to the output file. (The linker will
 - still use the alignment information internally, so the link is performed
 - correctly).
 - </p>
 - <p>Another example is COFF section names. COFF files may contain an
 - unlimited number of sections, each one with a textual section name. If
 - the target of the link is a format which does not have many sections (e.g.,
 - <code>a.out</code>) or has sections without names (e.g., the Oasys format), the
 - link cannot be done simply. You can circumvent this problem by
 - describing the desired input-to-output section mapping with the linker command
 - language.
 - </p>
 - <p><em>Information can be lost during canonicalization.</em> The BFD
 - internal canonical form of the external formats is not exhaustive; there
 - are structures in input formats for which there is no direct
 - representation internally.  This means that the BFD back ends
 - cannot maintain all possible data richness through the transformation
 - between external to internal and back to external formats.
 - </p>
 - <p>This limitation is only a problem when an application reads one
 - format and writes another.  Each BFD back end is responsible for
 - maintaining as much data as possible, and the internal BFD
 - canonical form has structures which are opaque to the BFD core,
 - and exported only to the back ends. When a file is read in one format,
 - the canonical form is generated for BFD and the application. At the
 - same time, the back end saves away any information which may otherwise
 - be lost. If the data is then written back in the same format, the back
 - end routine will be able to use the canonical form provided by the
 - BFD core as well as the information it prepared earlier.  Since
 - there is a great deal of commonality between back ends,
 - there is no information lost when
 - linking or copying big endian COFF to little endian COFF, or <code>a.out</code> to
 - <code>b.out</code>.  When a mixture of formats is linked, the information is
 - only lost from the files whose format differs from the destination.
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