5 Special Sections

When linking ELF format object files ld treats some sections in a special, non standard manner. This part of the manual describes these sections.

.gnu.warning

The contents of any section with this name are assumed to be an ascii format warning message. The contents will be displayed to the user if the sections appears in any input file, but the section will not be copied into the output image. If the --fatal-warnings option is enabled then the warnings - if any are encountered - will also stop the link from completing.

Note - the .gnu.warning section is not subject to linker garbage collection or orphan handling.

.gnu.warning.SYM

The contents of any section whoes name starts with the prefix .gnu.warning. and then finishes with the name of a symbol is treated in a similar fashion to the .gnu.warning section, but only if the named symbol is referenced. So for example the contents of a section called .gnu.warning.foo will be displayed as warning message if, and only if, the symbol foo is referenced by one or more of the input files. This includes object files pulled in from static libraries, shared objects needed to complete the link and so on.

Note - because these warning messages are generated before the linker performs garbage collection (if enabled) it is possible for a warning to be displayed for a symbol that is later removed and then never appears in the final output.

.note.gnu.property

When the linker combines sections of this name it will merge them together according to various rules encoded into the notes themselves. Therefore the contents of the output .note.gnu.property section may not correspond to a simple concatenation of the input sections. If the -Map option has been used to request a linker map then details of any property merging will be included in the map.