[U-Boot] [PATCH] spl: remove forced linking of commands into SPL

[Tyler Olmstead]

Hi Tom,

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 7:35 AM, Tom Rini <trini at ti.com> wrote:
> On 08/08/2012 07:24 PM, Tyler Olmstead wrote:
>
>> Remove linker command line options from the SPL makefile
>> that force the inclusion of unreferenced command code from
>> linked object files. As commands are not used in the SPL,
>> these options resulted in an unnecessary increase in the
>> image size, in addition to introducing the possibility of
>> tricky link errors in the case where the command code
>> contained symbols that were not resolved by linking in the
>> limited objects compiled in the SPL build.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Tyler Olmstead <tyler.j.olmstead at gmail.com>
>
> Without either figuring out how to make the strings be garbage collected
> automatically (I'm talking with a toolchain friend of mine about how to
> try and do this) or whacking U_BOOT_CMD to do this for us, we will start
> adding bloat to SPL after we do this.
>
> --
> Tom

I absolutely agree that bloat in the SPL should be avoided wherever
possible, but I don't understand how this patch would increase the
image size by *not* forcing commands to be linked in. There are
numerous examples where the linker is relied upon to not include
unused code into SPL. Is there something unique about U_BOOT_CMD that
makes it especially troublesome?

Thanks for your insight.
-- Tyler