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.bss Section

Authors:
Geoffrey Hunter
Geoffrey Hunter
Published On:
Nov 4, 2014
Last Updated:
Nov 4, 2014

The .bss section can be remembered as the “better save space” section. What it actually stands for block started by symbol.

It is a section used by many compilers and linkers (including GCC) to store part of the data segment containing statically-allocated variables that are initialised to 0 on startup in a compiled program.

The .bss section in the compiled object file doesn’t actually consume up any space (because all the memory is initialised to 0), apart from remembering the total size that this section will require at runtime.