why_live ?

[Hans-Peter Nilsson]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2014, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> 	Sorry to be a pain - but I couldn't dig this out of the mail archive /
> web page. We've a code size problem (this is LibreOffice ;-) that we're
> solving with -ffunction-sections --gc-sections et. al. which works
> really nicely great.
>
> 	However, there are still a number of things stuck in there that it is
> hard to determine why they are needed; of course - it is possible to manually
> remove them, and see who the linker complains about wrt. their users :-) and
> repeat that process to get some view of why; however Apple's linker has a
> -why_live parameter that helps a lot here:
>
> 	http://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/ld/
>
> 	I was wondering if gold / ld have some moral equivalent ? The output
> shows the chain of references that suck the symbol on; eg.
>
> 	http://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/why_live.filt.txt
>
> 	Is there an equivalent for binutils ?

RTFM GNU linker option "-y".

As a collateral, may I suggest taking the time to provide a
patch to improve the documentation such that this option would
be an easier find.

brgds, H-P