On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 10:09:35AM -0800, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > > That is not strictly required for LTO as I see it. With LTO, the lto > program is going to read the .o files with the IL information. It > will then generate a new .s file to pass to the assembler. The IL > information will never go through the linker. > > Of course, it is also possible that LTO .o files with IL information > will be passed directly to the linker, for whatever reason. In that > case, we may want the linker to remove the IL information. This is > not substantially different from the linker's current ability to strip > debugging information on request.
It is different since stripping debugging information is controlled by a linker switch. The new section attribute will make section to be discarded regardless any linker switch. > > So if you want to propose a solution for that, I think you should > consider how it can be used for debugging information as well. And I > don't think SHF_DISCARD is a good name. We don't want to arbitrarily > discard the data, we want to discard it in certain specific scenarios. It is just a way to make a section to be discarded for executable and DSO. I am not sure if you want to mark debugging information to be discarded unless you mean a switch which will ignore the new attribute so that such debugging information won't be discarded. You should mark a section with SHF_DISCARD only if such a section will be removed during final link in all scenarios. H.J.
