ARM mapping symbols ("$a", "$t", "$t.x" or "$d" are never really interesting. http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.dui0474c/CHDGFCDI.html symname() or symdata() should never return them since there is always a local or global symbol nearby that is more interesting.
Created attachment 6082 [details] Introduce and use special_arch_symbol() to filter out symbols in dump_symbol_tables Could you try this patch to see whether it helps in your case (I don't see the special symbols myself locally).
After some discussion with fche and testing by fturgison irc came up with this slight variant of the original patch: commit 15c110ee3cf1ffb034456e202b1060a9b0d51f12 Author: Mark Wielaard <mjw@redhat.com> Date: Thu Dec 1 20:02:02 2011 +0100 PR13462 symdata() returns ARM mapping symbols. Introduce skippable_arch_symbol() function that filters out arch specific symbols that should be ignored in dump_symbol_tables().