RFC: Support link with mixed IR/non-IR objects

[Mark Wielaard]

On Wed, 2012-05-09 at 09:16 -0600, Tom Tromey wrote:
> >>>>> "Alan" == Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> Alan> I've been saying this for a long time, but I'll try once more.  It
> Alan> would be a good thing if the kernel build stopped using ld -r.  ld -r
> Alan> is not the right tool for packaging object files.  You get the
> Alan> following undesirable behaviour from ld -r:
> 
> I'm not sure whether this is relevant to the current discussion, there
> were some threads (and patch) some years ago about moving the kernel to
> use ET_DYN modules instead, e.g.:
> 
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2002/11/23/59
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2002/11/15/94
> 
> I wonder what happened to this.

That would be nice. Also notice that because all relocations are kept in
ET_REL files including for the debuginfo that adds up to a sizable
amount. In fedora we now resolve at least the inter-debug relocations of
the .ko files, which saved ~ 500MB on installed size.
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/kernel/2012-February/003665.html
Moving to ET_DYN would get you that space savings for free.

Cheers,

Mark