• Jens Remus's avatar
    s390/build: Avoid relocation information in final vmlinux · 57216cc9
    Jens Remus authored
    Since commit 778666df ("s390: compile relocatable kernel without
    -fPIE") the kernel vmlinux ELF file is linked with --emit-relocs to
    preserve all relocations, so that all absolute relocations can be
    extracted using the 'relocs' tool to adjust them during boot.
    
    Port and adapt Petr Pavlu's x86 commit 9d9173e9 ("x86/build: Avoid
    relocation information in final vmlinux") to s390 to strip all
    relocations from the final vmlinux ELF file to optimize its size.
    Following is his original commit message with minor adaptions for s390:
    
    The Linux build process on s390 roughly consists of compiling all input
    files, statically linking them into a vmlinux ELF file, and then taking
    and turning this file into an actual bzImage bootable file.
    
    vmlinux has in this process two main purposes:
    1) It is an intermediate build target on the way to produce the final
       bootable image.
    2) It is a file that is expected to be used by debuggers and standard
       ELF tooling to work with the built kernel.
    
    For the second purpose, a vmlinux file is typically collected by various
    package build recipes, such as distribution spec files, including the
    kernel's own tar-pkg target.
    
    When building the kernel vmlinux contains also relocation information
    produced by using the --emit-relocs linker option. This is utilized by
    subsequent build steps to create relocs.S and produce a relocatable
    image. However, the information is not needed by debuggers and other
    standard ELF tooling.
    
    The issue is then that the collected vmlinux file and hence distribution
    packages end up unnecessarily large because of this extra data. The
    following is a size comparison of vmlinux v6.10 with and without the
    relocation information:
    
      | Configuration      | With relocs | Stripped relocs |
      | defconfig          |      696 MB |          320 MB |
      | -CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO |       48 MB |           32 MB |
    
    Optimize a resulting vmlinux by adding a postlink step that splits the
    relocation information into relocs.S and then strips it from the vmlinux
    binary.
    Reviewed-by: default avatarVasily Gorbik <gor@linux.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Remus <jremus@linux.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarVasily Gorbik <gor@linux.ibm.com>
    57216cc9
Makefile.postlink 963 Bytes