Is there a way to assemble assembly code across multiple files with rars?

[andrew-chang-dewitt]

Hi, I'm pretty new w/ assembly, so apologies if I'm using the wrong words to describe what I mean here.

I'm trying to separate my assembly code into multiple files using the .globl directive and then using the p option in the command line invocation of rars to assemble all the files in a directory into one program to be used in the rars simulator.

For example, I have a project structure similar to this:

./
|_ main.s
|_ other.s

where main.s contains something like the following:

        .globl main
        .data
# ...
        .text
main:
        # do some setup here...
        jal ra other
        # do something with results & exit...

and other.s is like this:

        .globl other
        .text
other:
        # process args & return a result here...

I've learned about using the stack pointer, return address, etc. to manage control flow between "functions" and am doing all of that correctly (I believe), but when I try to separate a function out to another file like in the above example, I get the following error when trying to run rars:

$ java -jar rars-1.7.jar main.s p
Error in <path>/main.s line <l> column <c>: Symbol "other" not found in symbol table.

Processing terminated due to errors.

Is rars capable of doing what I'm trying to do here & I'm just getting it wrong, or am I asking rars to do something that it isn't made to do?

Thanks!

[andrew-chang-dewitt]

Okay so in asking the question, I may have stirred the pot enough for me to answer it now too.

I added the sm option to my cli invocation, and things appear to be linking correctly now. So my invocation for the above example now looks like java -jar rars-1.7.jar main.s sm p. Hopefully anyone else who gets stuck on this like me can find this Q&A and get unstuck a little faster.