Function sections

Introduction
"Function sections" is a technique for reducing the size of the kernel image. It does this by placing each function into its own linker section, which then allows the linker to do better dead code removal.

Denys reported that usage of this technique got him about a 10% reduction in kernel size.

Theory of operation
Denys Vlasenko wrote:

-ffunction-sections instructs gcc to place each function (including static ones) in its own section named .text.function_name instead of placing all functions in one big .text section.

At link time, ld normally coalesces all such sections into one output section .text again. It is achieved by having *(.text.*) spec along with *(.text) spec in built-in linker scripts.

However, if ld is invoked with the option --gc-sections, it tracks references, starting from the entry point and marks all input sections which are reachable from there. Then it discards all input sections which are not marked.

This doesn't buy much if you have one big .text section per .o module, because even one referenced function will pull in entire section. However, if you use -ffunction-sections to split .text into per-function sections it makes --gc-sections much more useful.

-fdata-sections is analogous: it places each global or static variable into .data.variable_name, .rodata.variable_name or .bss.variable_name.

Status
Denys submitted patches in July 2008 to make the kernel compilable using "gcc -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections". See http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/7/1/499