Back in 2004 we added logic to arch/ppc64/Makefile to pass
the --synthetic option to nm, if it was supported by nm.

Then in 2005 when arch/ppc64 and arch/ppc were merged, the logic to
add --synthetic was moved inside an #ifdef CONFIG_PPC64 block within
arch/powerpc/Makefile, and has remained there since.

That was fine, though crufty, until recently when a change to
init/Kconfig added a config time check that uses $(NM). On powerpc
that leads to an infinite loop because Kconfig uses $(NM) to calculate
some values, then the powerpc Makefile changes $(NM), which Kconfig
notices and restarts.

The original commit that added --synthetic simply said:
  On new toolchains we need to use nm --synthetic or we miss code
  symbols.

And the nm man page says that the --synthetic option causes nm to:
  Include synthetic symbols in the output. These are special symbols
  created by the linker for various purposes.

So it seems safe to always pass --synthetic if nm supports it, ie. on
32-bit and 64-bit, it just means 32-bit kernels might have more
symbols reported (and in practice I see no extra symbols). Making it
unconditional avoids the #ifdef CONFIG_PPC64, which in turn avoids the
infinite loop.
Debugged-by: Peter Collingbourne <pcc@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>