Solaris linker does not recognize option --gc-sections

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My Solaris 11.3 testing machine is currently not working and waiting for hardware tweaking, but on Solaris 11.2 I've not been able to duplicate this issue. Simply speaking there is no --gc-sections param passed to the linker at all.

Side note: binary distributions for Solaris are built on Solaris 11.2. I've attempted to test GHC build on Solaris 11.3 but so far was not able to come up with working build. The reason is that in between 11.2 and 11.3 there are quite some low-level changes which affects GHC build.

Possible workaround: search for setting file in your GHC installation directory and see if -Wl,--gc-sections option is there. If so, edit file and remove this option.

git grep gc-sections only returns one hit (and a comment). In compiler/main/DriverPipeline.hs::

                      ++ (if sLdIsGnuLd mySettings
                          then ["-Wl,--gc-sections"]
                          else [])

This code was added in 4a32bf92 (#8405 (closed)).

changed the description

herzen, where does your ld come from? Presumably it's not a gnu ld in which case perhaps our ld detection is broken.

It would be helpful if you could provide the output of ghc --info and ld --version.

Replying to [ticket:12460#comment:123979 bgamari]:

herzen, where does your ld come from? Presumably it's not a gnu ld

Oops, I didn't know about "ghc --info". Yes, it turns out that the ld that was being used was gnu ld. When I change that to Solaris's ld (/usr/bin/ld), the behavior I reported as a bug goes away.

My mistake was to assume that the option --with-ld passed to ./configure has no effect, because I was dealing with a prebuilt binary of ghc, as opposed to building it myself. I was packaging the prebuilt binary using Solaris's build system called pkgbuild, which is derived from rpmbuild. The way we use that build system is by having a PATH in which /usr/gnu/bin is in front of /usr/bin; that is why gnu ld was getting picked up instead of Solaris ld. The spec file I was working with, which was written by someone else and actually built ghc, supplied --with-ld=/usr/bin/ld to ./configure, but I deleted that, because I didn't think it made a difference for what I was doing, as I said.

It was sloppy of me to file a bug report instead of making sure that Solaris ld was being used, as I had assumed.

I could paste what "ghc --info" produces, but I don't think there's any point now.

kgardas noted above that he makes his builds on Solaris 11.2. I will go on investigating whether I run into problems with his builds on 11.3. (I have set up a Solaris 11.2 system, in case I need to compare what happens between the two Solaris releases.)

Thank you very much for your suggestion. I should have thought of that myself.

closed

Oops, I didn't know about "ghc --info". Yes, it turns out that the ld that was being used was gnu ld. When I change that to Solaris's ld (/usr/bin/ld), the behavior I reported as a bug goes away.

Great!

It was sloppy of me to file a bug report instead of making sure that Solaris ld was being used, as I had assumed.

Not a problem, you can't think of everything. I'm glad we were able to resolve it without code.

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Trac field	Value
Resolution	Unresolved → ResolvedInvalid

added Pnormal label

Solaris linker does not recognize option --gc-sections

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