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MIPS, strip --only-keep-debug & an infinite loop

Daniel Jacobowitz drow@false.org
Fri Apr 29 14:07:00 GMT 2005 
On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 02:47:51PM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> 
> > objcopy --only-keep-debug does the same thing to _every_ non-debug
> > section.  Take a look at the resulting files.
> 
>  Hard to do actually, as `objdump -h' hangs similarly... ;-)

Readelf will be of more use.

>  But I've tried with a different target and the result is weird -- all 
> non-debugging sections are merged to overlap starting from the same file 
> offset, keeping their sizes, VMA, etc. intact...  Program headers, if 
> present, get adjusted accordingly.

You missed the vital bit.  They all become NOBITS sections.  The
original file still has their original contents; they are only in this
file because .symtab will have contents, and it references section
numbers.

> > I would not expect --keep-debug to remove non-debug sections, unlike
> > --only-keep-debug :-)
> 
>  Well, I'm confused about what to expect, especially as documentation 
> further states:
> 
> `--only-keep-debug'
>      Strip a file, removing any sections that would be stripped by
>      `--strip-debug' and leaving the debugging sections.
> 
> Given what you write, I suppose s/would/would not/ should be applied to 
> above.  Am I right?

Yes.

>  Then the affected sections should get completely 
> removed and not mangled like currently, avoiding the problem altogether.  
> Removing ".MIPS.options" alongside ".text", ".data", etc. is of course 
> something that's beyond the MIPS64 ELF spec and would be quite a 
> reasonable action to perform.

Not at all, because then we could not define debugging symbols in
.text.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC
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