What is the recommended section flags for a statically-linked MS COFF format that works seamlessly in almost all situations?



For some reasons, certain linkers complain of inconsistent sections configurations. The third line seems to be acceptable by LINK without any warnings. But still, not very sure and haven't tested against other linkers.

Thanks for advises.

Yeah, I've seen the COFF Linker warnings about inconsistent attributes also.

Vid's Mixing assembly with MS Visual C, available in the fasm downloads page, has been very instructive for me and uses your third option:



It also has a data example:



The example is MS COFF 32, not 64. I would assume a writeable '.text' section is used when the instructions are re-written. I've been self-modifying instructions quite heavily lately but don't remember seeing problems without this flag. I have the writeable flag included now, though, along with align 16.

The MS COFF specs have a lot details such as flag binary values and say the number of sections can be variable though the loader limits the section count to 96.

A similar fasm thread that goes a little deeper here.

Thanks for the clarifications and links, donn.

Seems that the safest option for me (for now) is to use full similar section flags as the PE (the third one), since IMO, most MS services (kernel, msvcrt) use similar section control flags.