[Bug ld/1811] ELF linker loads member of archive for common symbol

[ian at airs dot com]

------- Additional Comments From ian at airs dot com  2005-11-06 04:58 -------
Am I sure about the a.out behaviour?  Yes, I am.  When I refer to SunOS I do
mean SunOS 4, pre Solaris, which used the a.out object file format.

The strange behaviour of common symbols increasing size even without linking in
the object file was used to make stdin/stdout/stderr work in the traditional
a.out libc.  A linker which failed to implement it correctly could not link a
"hello, world" program.

AT&T went to COFF in SVR3, and they changed the behaviour of common symbols at
that time.  I've used SVR2, but I don't have a clear recollection of how the
linker worked.


I think that on Solaris we have to do what the native linker does.  Likewise on
UnixWare.  So if they have different behaviour, we have to have different
defaults.  It would of course be reasonable to provide a command line option to
control this.

-- 


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1811

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