Re: Qn regarding building an application of smallest size for ARM-11 using gcc

[Ingo Krabbe <ikrabbe.ask@web.de>]

Am Dienstag, 27. Juni 2006 06:22 schrieb Binesh:
> Hi,
>
> We are trying to build an application for ARM-11 using gcc and the
> related auto make suite) that would occupy minimal size.
>
> After adding the -Os and -mthumb we noticed that the size of the
> stripped executable with a dependency on libc.so and libz.so was about
> 87K.
> However, when we statically linked it the stripped size grew to 510 K.
> We removed all code that uses any of string library or stdio and
> instead use only system calls such as ioctl, read, write, mmap and
> munmap. (verified using the symbol dumped out by readelf)
> Despite this the size remains at 510K.
> Trying to link with -nostdlib fails as it refers to undefined
> reference to ioctl, read, write, mmap and munmap.
> Trying to link with -nostartfiles brought down the size to only 502K.
>
> Do the sys call routines need std libs to be linked in?
> Is there an alternative to reduce the size of the statically linked
> exe? (Assuming that it might be difficult to migrate all code to asm)
>
> Would appreciate some help / guidance on this. In case there is
> another forum/ list which would better annswer these question, please
> fwd me to the same.
>
> Thanks!
> -Binesh

I think you have a libc.so problem.  This means, you are using glibc, which 
really is no emebedded solution library.  You should think about using 
smaller libraries that better fit you purpose.  I found a nice page that 
lists some solutions:

http://penguinppc.org/embedded/howto/library.html

bye ingo