OSDev.org

I realised that the article "Calling Global Constructors" on the wiki directs us to use the .init and .fini section methods to call constructors -- particularly the "gcc will nicely put the contents of ..." implementation. Unfortunately, with my GCC 9.2 OS-spec compiler, it's not populating those sections as advertised. (they're there, but empty).

What I did find to work was the .init_array and .fini_array method that is supposedly only for ARM, but from what I could find online it's the "new" method of doing things. So my question is: are there existing kernels on a recent(-ish) version of GCC that have had success with the .init .fini method? Maybe i'm just doing things wrong...

No, everything is fine. The .init and .fini approach was extremely brittle, and precluded some linker options from being used (--sort-sections=alignment being the best known problematic one). So instead the newer .init_array and .fini_array mechanism is now used everywhere. .init and .fini are only there for legacy support.

hmm, okay. i must've been doing something wrong then.