This is the mail archive of the
elfutils-devel@sourceware.org
mailing list for the elfutils project.
Re: release soonish
- From: Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>
- To: elfutils-devel at lists dot fedorahosted dot org
- Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:47:15 -0800
- Subject: Re: release soonish
> But if you emit the information anyway then it is (as even Alan admits)
> useful for analysing tools. In this particular case knowing that a
> symbol/address came from the .tm_clone_table seems useful to me.
Agreed.
> > Unless I'm missing something, there are three sensible options.
> > 1. A preserved symbol in a discarded section becomes SHN_ABS.
> > 2. A discarded section is not actually discarded, but assigned to one of
> > the adjacent output sections, so its symbols wind up in that section.
> > 3. No orphan input section is discarded if it contains any symbols.
>
> There also is the option of just doing away with the section table
> and just keep the program headers when producing an executable of
> course. But that also isn't particularly useful.
It's useful for some things, but only for things wherein you discard the
entire symbol table, so this issue is moot.
> > My impression is that gold just doesn't discard any sections at all,
> > instead producing empty output sections. I don't see any harm in that.
>
> Yes, that (3) seems the best option. IMHO. Both 1 and 2 loose the original
^-o
> information.
Agreed.
> But we need to have this discussion on the binutils list
> if we want to advocate a change/patch for ld.
Feel free to CC me if you take it up there.
Thanks,
Roland