Re: [PATCH 1/5] kbuild: allow architectures to use thin archives instead of ld -r

[Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2016 16:40:54 +0200
Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 07, 2016 at 11:49:46AM +1000, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> > Hi Sam,
> > 
> > On Sat, 6 Aug 2016 22:10:45 +0200 Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org> wrote:  
> > >
> > > Did you by any chance evalue the use of INPUT in linker files.
> > > Stephen back then (again based on proposal from Alan Modra),
> > > also made an implementation using INPUT.  
> > 
> > The problem with that idea was that (at least for some versions of
> > binutils in use at the time) we hit a static limit to the number of
> > object files and ld just stopped at that point. :-(  
> 
> The ld bug was caused by opening too many linked definitions files.
> We can workaround this by expanding the files.
> I gave this a quick spin - see below.
> 
> Note - I have no idea if using thin archived or this method is better.
> But it seems just wrong to me that we convert to thin archives when
> we really do not need to do so.
> 
> Note - this was a quick spin. It build fine here and thats it.

Is there a reason to prefer using linker scripts rather than thin
archives? I thought the former was possibly a bit less robust, and
the latter a smaller change for scripts and toolchain in terms
of "almost behaving like an object file".

I don't have a strong preference although do have a couple of
(out of tree) scripts that expect objdump to work on built-in.o

Thanks,
Nick