intermittent 0-length for .note.gnu.arm.ident

[James Lemke]

I've been looking at an oddball problem and I'm wondering if anyone here
has some ideas.

I'm building a mingw x xscale-elf toolchain and some of the objects have
normal .note.gnu.arm.ident sections (length 0x1c) and others have those
section with length 0.  The objects with 0-length sections seem to be
normal otherwise.  If I ignore linker warnings the DejaGNU tests run OK.

I never get 0-length sections for cygwin x xscale-elf from the same
sources.

One place the 0-length note sections show up often is:
<build-dir>/xscale-elf/libstdc++-v3/libsupc++/*.o

If I manually re-compile one of the 0-length .o's, it always produces a
section with 0x1c length.  As does a make in that directory.  But a
top-level make gives the random sometimes 0-length note sections.

arm_add_note() gets called with the same parms for both zero & non-zero
cases.  So what would cause the contents to disappear?

I've tried various versions of MinGW packages without making a
difference.
I'm currently using the latest mingw binary packages and my sources are:
gcc-4.0  binutils-2.15  plus local mods.

Any ideas or suggestions?

TIA,
Jim.

-- 
Jim Lemke   jwlemke@wasabisystems.com   Orillia, Ontario