.noinit and .persistent alignment It's more elegant to make the section match up with its "_start" symbol. We could align by setting the address of the section (by using ALIGN before the colon), but this way we also set sh_addralign to at least $ALIGNMENT. * scripttempl/elf.sc (.noinit, .persistent): Align the output section rather than using ". = ALIGN();" at the beginning. Set address to zero when not a final link.