In message 1290700844-31427-1-git-send-email-wd@denx.de you wrote:
The switch from archive libraries to partial linking has introduced a number of problems, that are non-trivial to solve. For example, it is no longer possible to include individual object files in the linker script as we did before for example in the case of boards with embedded environment to fill up the gap caused by the need to align the environment on flash erase block boundaries.
The best (but unfortunately not easiest) approach to address this problem is probably to enable -ffunction-sections (and -ffunction-sections) so we can again (and even in much finer granularity) place certain code where we want it. When doing this step, it seems only consequent to also add --gc-sections which has the added benefit of reducing the memory footprint of the U-Boot image (both in flash and in RAM).
Unfortunately, this requires changes to a lot of linker scripts.
...
Whole series (latest versions of the patches) applied.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk