[coreboot] debugging symbols for final ROM image

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 22.04.2008 02:21, Jeremy Jackson wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 02:03 +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>
>   
>> You can use binutils, but the resulting file is still too big for my
>> taste after compression. That's why my script did lots of dirty tricks
>> to squeeze binutils output down do an absolute minimum.
>>     
>
> Well now I'm curious, what else does binutils leave lying around, surely
> the text/data sections are no different... the section headers/program
> headers shouldn't be very big.  Any other sections can probably be
> dropped given the right commands/options.
>   

When you're optimizing for size, shaving off a hundred bytes of header
and other assorted stuff does matter. Absolute minimum is a file which
has no header, keeps all required symbol names sorted by name as
consecutive zero-terminated strings, followed by a zero byte, followed
by an array of addresses. The name list can be compressed with
algorithms suited best for sorted printable strings and/or the whole
file can be compressed with lzma.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel