On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hey,
> >
> > So I spent 3-4 hrs today (I'm stupid yes) tracking down a .o
> > breakage by blaming rawhide gcc/binutils as I was using make
> > V=1and seeing only the compiler chain running,
>
> Hm, is this that powerpc related build bug you just reported?

Well we tracked it down and it is powerpc64 specific.

Seems that in drivers/hwmon/lm93.c there's a function called:

   LM93_IN_FROM_REG()

But PPC64 has function descriptors and the real function names (the ones
you see in objdump) start with a '.'. Thus this in objdump you have:

 Disassembly of section .text:

 0000000000000000 <.LM93_IN_FROM_REG>:
       0:       7c 08 02 a6     mflr    r0
       4:       fb 81 ff e0     std     r28,-32(r1)

The function name used is .LM93_IN_FROM_REG. But gcc considers symbols
that start with ".L" as a special symbol that is used inside the assembly
stage.

The nm passed into recordmcount uses the --synthetic option which shows
the ".L" symbols (my runs outside of the build did not include the
--synthetic option, so my older patch worked). We see the function as a
local.

Now to capture all the locations that use "mcount" we need to have a
reference to link into the object file a list of mcount callers. We need a
reference that will not disappear. We try to use a global function and if
that does not work, we use a local function as a reference. But to relink
the section back into the object, we need to make it global. In this case,
we run objcopy using --globalize-symbol and --localize-symbol to convert
the symbol into a global symbol, link the mcount list, then convert it
back to a local symbol.

This works great except for this case. .L* symbols can not be converted
into a global symbol, and the mcount section referencing it will remain
unresolved.
Reported-by: NDave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com>
LKML-Reference: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0908052011590.5010@gandalf.stny.rr.com>
Signed-off-by: NSteven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>