Re: [PATCH for-4.22] xen/x86: Always strip xen.efi

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>]

On 16.06.2026 16:07, Frediano Ziglio wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 at 15:42, Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 11.06.2026 16:38, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>> On 08.06.2026 19:31, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>>> Some old versions of binutils ld managed to produce efi files which the
>>>> matching version of strip couldn't process.  This includes Binutils 2.26
>>>> included in Ubuntu 16.04.  Delete the workaround for this bug, and require a
>>>> less broken toolchain.
>>>
>>> And we're certain newer versions of strip don't do any harm to the binaries?
>>> Already towards Frediano's posting I said that having looked at how things
>>> work there, I'm far from certain.
>>
>> I should have added: An option may be to link twice: Once with debug info
>> included, and once with it stripped. Personally I trust the linker creating
>> the various headers, including the section ones, more than strip's (or
>> objcopy's). Yet then I can only repeat my observation that linking PE+ from
>> ELF inputs looks to be significantly slower than linking ELF -> ELF.
> 
> That was also attempted. See previous versions. And no, it does not work.

How exactly does it not work? When stripping debug info while linking (as
we now do for the first two passes), the resulting image should be both
small enough and correct. What am I missing? The only caveat I'm aware of
is the Eclair scan, where we should avoid doing any work for the
"auxiliary" linking step (the one not producing the binary that's actually
going to be used for running Xen).

Jan