Re: as/ld silently creates programs with undefined references/symbols

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Russell,

> Can you estimate how long this bug has been in binutils?  I'm aware of
> versions from around 2.13 which is about 2 years old, and I know that
> 2.11 worked correctly.

The bug has been there for several years at least.  I think that it was 
probably introduced as a side effect of this patch:

  2002-09-17  Nick Clifton  <address@hidden>

        * config/tc-arm.c (md_apply_fix3): Note that an implemented
        BFD_RELOC_ARM_IMMEDIATE has been done.


> As I suspected, the only reliable way to detect this failure is to run
> an extra step after the final link to detect undefined symbols in the
> final object:
>
>         arm-linux-nm $@ | grep '^ *U '
>
> and force build failure if any are found.
>
> Given that it will be a while until people are using a fixed toolchain,
> and the range of binutils versions affected, I think it's important to
> have a way to detect this failure such that kernel developers can filter
> out the incorrectly built kernels.

Fair enough.  I assume that you can add this to the kernel build makefiles ?

Cheers
  Nick