Hey all,
As I just mentioned in another thread, gcc bug #54303 [1] causes us problems. -fmerge-constants is an optimization enabled in most levels. On some platforms such as x86_64, when used with -fdata-sections it means that each set of "strings" in a function will result in a per-function .rodata.strN.N section. Later when a function isn't used these sections can also be garbage collected. However, on ARM this isn't what happens. All strings for an object file are collected into a single .rodata.strN.N section. Further, these sections are combined again when we link our library. This means that we can only garbage collect strings for a given library when none of them are used. This is OK in some cases as we luck out and don't need any of the functions with printf/puts. In other cases, such as if we move the SPL framework to common/ all of the strings we need will be retained. This pushes us over the size limit in some cases, along with being a flat-out bug.
As this is a bug, and something that is handled correctly on other platforms my hope is that fixing the problem won't be hard for someone that knows the toolchain and eventually we can set a minimum requirement on a gcc without this bug. A work-around for this would be to disable -fmerge-constants but this results in a larger SPL binary, but not so large as when we collected nothing. It is larger than being careful about where we place source files, so I would only suggest this as a work-around once we have a fixed gcc available.
[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=54303