[PATCH] RFC: garbage collect unused code/data?

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 05:28:59PM +0300, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 April 2006 19:30, David Daney wrote:
> > Note that in the case of mips, the linker has had the --gc-sections 
> > option for quite some time now, but has only had working support since 
> > about 'GNU ld version 2.16.91 20050817'.  The first official binutils 
> > release that will work with --gc-sections is 2.17.
> > 
> > Probably the best way to handle it would be through some sort of 
> > configure option (perhaps in conjunction with the linker test).  That 
> > way it could be turned off if someone was using a broken tool chain.
> 
> Why do you want it configurable? Dropping a few unused code fragments
> can never hurt...
> 
> I think that with checks for "known good" gcc and ld versions
> (arch-dependent) it could be enabled unconditionally.

It should be configurable so the ELF users can disable it and see what
bloat they still need to fix.

Rich