How to remove unused references from a shared library (elf/gcc)

Question

I'm building a shared library that contains a public interface found some object file public.o

The shared library is composed of 100+ other objects files and I want to minimize the size if the .so file. Is there a way to remove of all the symbols from from the shared library that are not referenced by public.o? Alternatively, is there a way to retain only dependencies of extern "C" functions, stripping all of the unused C++ names?

Question is answered here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2088409/stripping-linux-shared-libraries — user48956, Aug 29 '11 at 18:51

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 13 '11 at 01:36

2

Look at this manual:
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Visibility
it explains for example how to handle C++ names stuff.

answered Nov 13 '11 at 01:36

fghj

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Basile Starynkevitch · Answer 2 · 2011-12-19T19:52:47.217

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You might use a recent GCC (e.g. a 4.6.1 version) and pass -flto at compile and at (library) link time.

(added) You could also play with the visibility attribute.

But I won't bother about the size of an *.so

edited Dec 19 '11 at 19:52

answered Oct 25 '11 at 20:53

Basile Starynkevitch

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Stripping the unused symbols reduces our library size from 15Mb to 300kb. Its for an embedded Linux device - this is quite a saving. – user48956 Dec 19 '11 at 19:06

How to remove unused references from a shared library (elf/gcc)

2 Answers2