ELF section groups

[Jan Beulich]

I'm seeing two odd things here, and I'd be glad if someone could explain why gas does them.

(1) Why is there a STT_SECTION symbol for each SHT_GROUP section? There can't be relocations against such sections, so I'd think they should be considered as artificial as SHT_SYMTAB or SHT_STRTAB ones, and not have symbol table entries?

(2) The name of the SHT_GROUP sections generally is .group, since the common case (i.e. output from gcc) is the group identifier being selected identical to the identifying symbol, thus causing the symbol_find_exact lookup to find a symbol and rename the section. I can't see where group names and symbol names conflict, that is, why this renaming is done.

Thanks, Jan