Hi Nick,

On Friday, 21 October 2016 11:51:47 BST Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> Paul Burton <paul.burton@imgtec.com> wrote:
> > This series fixes a few issues with CONFIG_LD_DEAD_CODE_DATA_ELIMINATION
> > and then enables it, along with CONFIG_THIN_ARCHIVES, for MIPS. This
> > 
> > leads to a typical generic kernel build becoming ~5% smaller:
> >   add/remove: 0/3028 grow/shrink: 1/14 up/down: 18/-457362 (-457344)
> >   ...
> >   Total: Before=9001030, After=8543686, chg -5.08%
> > 
> > Applies atop v4.9-rc1.
> 
> Very nice, and thanks for the kbuild fixes, I think they all look sane.
> 
> Let's try to get those kbuild fixes in through the kbuild tree first
> (which has some other fixes required for 4.9). I can take them and send
> them to kbuild maintainer if you like.

That sounds great :)

> On powerpc we'll likely provide an option to select these manually for
> 4.9 because there has been the odd toolchain issue come up, so that's
> something to consider.

I imagine the MIPS bits will probably be v4.10 material, but hopefully Ralf 
can get them into -next as soon as possible after the kbuild bits are in, 
which should give us some time to discover any toolchain issues.

> For your linker script, you may consider putting the function sections
> into the same input as other text. TEXT_TEXT does not include .text.*,
> so mips's .text.* below it will catch those.
> 
> You may just open-code your TEXT_TEXT, and have:
> 
> *(.text.hot .text .text.fixup .text.unlikely .text.[0-9a-zA-Z_]*)
> 
> or similar.

Ah, so are you saying that would give the linker more scope for discarding 
things?

Thanks,
    Paul