Re: Empty section removal has messed up MIPS gdb

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 02:53:17PM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 05:35:33PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > GCC used to leave a message for the debugger in the form of an empty
> > section:
> > 
> >       /* Generate a special section to describe the ABI switches used to
> >          produce the resultant binary.  This used to be done by the assembler
> >          setting bits in the ELF header's flags field, but we have run out of
> >          bits.  GDB needs this information in order to be able to correctly
> >          debug these binaries.  See the function mips_gdbarch_init() in
> >          gdb/mips-tdep.c.  This is unnecessary for the IRIX 5/6 ABIs and
> >          causes unnecessary IRIX 6 ld warnings.  */
> > 
> > The emitted bits were simply:
> > 
> > 	.section .mdebug.abi64
> > 	.previous
> > 
> > The sections are now stripped.  I don't want to put contents in them and
> > waste object file space unless it's absolutely necessary.  How should I
> > cajole ld into leaving them?
> > 
> 
> Mark it KEEP?

This is something that has to be done in the linker, right?  i.e. the
linker would also need to know about this convention.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC