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But the sections existed in the object files leaving me flummoxed. Why wasn’t the linker using the sections? So I went down one of the most interesting systems rabbit holes I’ve had recently.

So dynamic flag automatically generates sections using inline assembly. One section has the list of all flags. Then there are arbitrarily many other sections that are a “view” into that list of flags for more efficient lookups. There is no access of any sections beyond using '__start' and '__stop'

Luckily I had two build flavors with one passing and the other failing. I manually went through every linker flag difference to guess which one was causing issues. And '—gc-sections' looked suspicious. The linker has some crazy complexity to how it decides to GC sections.

There has actually been a ton of consideration to handling these sort of “meta” sections that have no direct access and thus do not participate in general GC references. But upon further looking the dynamic flag didn’t use any of the special flags. So I found my bug, the linker was GCing it

20/10/25, 3:55 pm0 reposts0 likes

Of course this is where I ended up at maskray’s blog doing deep reads of linker GC (maskray.me/blog/2021-02... ) and metadata sections (maskray.me/blog/2021-01...). I realized the main flag list should always exist and the view should only be kept if in use.