Binutils causes abnormally large, non-working binaries since 2.43

[Jan Beulich]

On 16.02.2025 17:57, Bastiaan Timmer wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I was contemplating posting this to the bug-binutils, but given my 
> complete lack of knowledge on what I'm experiencing I thought it safer 
> to post here.
> 
> A few days ago, an update to the Arch (AUR) package mingw-w64-openssl 
> became available. After building it, it resulted in an abnormally large 
> static library (libcrypto.dll.a). A program I regularly link against 
> this also suddenly ballooned in size (from 9,9MB to around 25MB), and - 
> more importantly - does not run anymore.
> 
> After a thorough investigation into the source of the trouble, I found 
> it seems mingw-w64-binutils is the culprit. When building and installing 
> 2.42, everything is back to normal. building the mingw-w64-openssl 
> package results in:
> 
>      [~] $ ls -lh /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a
>      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3,7M feb 16 15:06 
> /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a
> 
> And any programs using this library run as expected. After updating to 
> mingw-w64-binutils 2.43, building the exact same openssl package in the 
> exact same way results in:
> 
>      [~] $ ls -lh /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a
>      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 114,4M feb 16 15:59 
> /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a
> 
> Note the very large size. Also, it is non-functional.
> 
> I realize compiling openssl is not exactly a minimal example, and I have 
> no clue what part of binutils is actually at fault here. Given that it's 
> a mingw-package, I'm not even sure this is the right mailing list 
> (though the PKGBUILD does point here as its source). But I am hoping 
> someone has a clue what could be going on just from these symptoms, or 
> can try to explain to me how to get more useful information about this 
> problem.

Well. To at least stand a chance of figuring what changed in which way,
can you please provide dumps of the crucial parts of both variants of
the archive (constituents, and possibly of the constituents: headers,
sections, and perhaps also symbols)? Yet better might be if you could
upload both binaries somewhere, for people to do their own inspection.
(Of course I say this without having a clue where the issue might be;
others may have a clue and not require any extra information.)

Jan