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I recently ported some sources from TASM to NASM, allowing to assemble either with -f bin format or -f obj. I was surprised to find that -f obj accepted to specify sections with vstart= but that had no effect on the actual output. I understand that this is something the linker should implement rather than the assembler. I do think NASM should warn or error out on this however. Reference: https://codeberg.org/boeckmann/ranish/issues/3#issuecomment-683832 In the NASM source, the OMF output format simply ignores unknown section attributes: https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm/blob/9939a2c00ec752100acbfaac01757f271f7d6040/output/outobj.c#L1512
You are, of course, correct. The parsing of directives in general quite frankly sucks; they are pretty much ad hoc everywhere which makes it hard to catch errors. I'm always afraid of breaking existing code, for obvious reasons, and future backwards compatibility becomes an issue but the answer to both of these is pretty easy: this should be a warning, not an error. That being said, this is obviously not 2.16 material, and probably not a huge priority for 2.17 since it after all doesn't affect code generation per se. However, please do let me say that I'm super appreciative of all your testing help and very good bug reports. They have been invaluable for the 2.16 work.