How to make an object file that cannot be dead_stripped?

Question

What is the easiest way to produce a Mach-O object file that does not have the SUBSECTIONS_VIA_SYMBOLS flag set, such that the linker (with -dead_strip) will not later try to cut the text section into pieces and guess which pieces are used?

I can use either a command-line option to llvm/gcc (4.2.1) that will prevent it from emitting .subsections_via_symbols in the first place, or a command-line tool that will remove the flag from an existing object file.

(Writing such a tool myself based on the Mach-O spec is an option, but if possible I'd rather not reinvent the wheel that hard).

Platform: iOS, cross-compiling from OSX with XCode 4.5.

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Background: We're supplying a static library that other companies build into apps. When our library encounters a problem it produces a crash report with a stack trace and certain other key information that (if we're lucky) we get to analyze later. Typically the apps as deployed have been stripped of debug information so interpreting stack traces is a problem. If we were making the app ourselves we would just save the DWARF debug data from before stripping and use that to decode the addresses in the incoming crash reports. But we can't depend on the app makers supplying us with such data from their linking steps.

What we're doing instead is to let the crash report include the run-time address of selected function; from that we can deduce the offset between addresses in our linker map and addresses in the crash report. We're linking our entire library incrementally into a single .o before we stuff it into an .a; since it does only one big thing there wouldn't be much to save from removing unused functionality from it when the app is eventually linked. Unfortunately there's a few small pieces of code in the library that are sometimes not used (alternative API entry points for the main functionality, small helper functions for interpreting our error codes and the like), and if the app developer links with -dead_strip, it disturbs the address reconstruction of crash reports that the relative offsets in the final app differ from the linker map from our incremental link operation.

We can't realistically ask all app developers to disable dead-code stripping in their build process, so it seems a better way forward if we could mark our .o as "not dead-strippable" and have the eventual app linking respect that.

Answer 1

I solved it.

The output of an incremental link operation only has MH_SUBSECTIONS_VIA_SYMBOLS set if all the input objects have it set. And an object file produced from assembler input only has it set if there's an explicit directive set. So one can remove the flag by linking with an empty assembler input:

echo > empty.s
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) input.o empty.s -nostdlib -Wl,r -o output.o