> Concerning the problems with __start___ksymtab and friends: I experienced
> the same problems after upgrading to binutils-2.7.0.{3,9}, and they did
> not go away after upgrading to the latest bin86 package.
>
> After looking into the ld source, I found the place where __start
> and __stop symbols are generated, but my copy of ld failed to do
> so. Apparently, the binary package on sunsite is broken in this respect,
> because as I recompiled and installed 2.7.0.9, everything worked fine
> (use ./configure --host=i486-linux --prefix=/usr).
>
> There's one pitfall, though -- the kernel Makefiles check for the presence
> of encaps, and if it's there, invoke objdump with flags -k -q. These flags
> are no longer supported. Remove encaps, and the kernel will pick objcopy
> instead, which works flawlessly.
>
> Cost me a whole day this bugger:-)
>
Well, I think something else is also going on. I am running the binutils-2.7.0.3
binary package and I have never had a single problem.
Since I am only interested in the x86 architecture, I untarred the package into
a temp directory and pruned all the files for the alpha, m68, and sparc
architectures. Could these be causing the problem?
It might also be useful to look in /usr/i486-linux/lib and see if all the files
there seem reasonable.
Whatever is going on only affects some people.