Re: stripping symbols needed for relocations

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Jan,

> The --strip-all case is out of question, but my concern is primarily
> with the combination of --strip-symbol/--strip-symbols and -w, but to
> some degree also with the plain use of --strip-symbol/--strip-symbols:
> When trying to cut down the number of symbols in the linux kernel
> (subject to kallsyms lookup) I'm trying to eliminate all non-text
> symbols. Finding them is not a problem, but filtering out those used in
> relocations is, which is why I'd want objcopy to do this for me. Since
> I'm of the general opinion that --strip-symbol for symbols used in
> relocations for non-discarded sections (which I would hope already don't
> get the BSF_KEEP flag set) will result in a broken output file, I'd like
> to make objcopy smart enough to deal with that situation (possibly
> through a new option --keep-needed or --force-strip-needed, depending on
> what the desirable default would be and whether keeping the current
> behavior is a requirement).

OK - I see your point.  My original thinking was that if the user had 
specified --strip-symbol=foo on the objcopy command line then that meant 
that they definitely wanted "foo" stripped out, even if it was used in a 
reloc, and that they knew what they were doing.

Given that we are dealing with the binutils here, where you are allowed 
to shoot yourself in the foot if you do not know what you are doing, I 
think that this behaviour of the --strip-symbol switch should be 
retained.  I would have no objections however to a patch which added 
another switch, say --strip-unused-symbol=<>, or indeed the 
--keep-needed switch you suggested, in order to provide a safer 
environment for stripping symbols.

Cheers
  Nick