[quote user="Toby Mole"]A) The description of .ebss from the documentation says that data in .ebss is "global and static" variables... I guess this is static as in function scope static rather than static file scope??[/quote]
What's stored there is non-const static-scope variables. Static-scope variables are global variables and function-local static-declared variables.
Yes, string literals go in .econst:string