ld: spurious empty .plt/.rela.plt sections generated

[Roland McGrath]

I am seeing a strange thing.  The (BFD) linker spuriously generates .plt
and .rela.plt sections (both empty) for a link that has no need for them.
It's reproduced with a trivial example, and seen on today's binutils trunk.
Gold does not produce the empty sections.

Empty sections are normally harmless, but in combination with a custom
linker script (and possibly other more arcane bugs in orphan placement
handling empty sections), it produces undesireable results.

Is this a known issue?


Thanks,
Roland

        $ cat r.s
                .globl foo
        foo:    ret
                .globl _start
        _start: call foo
        $ as -o r.o r.s
        $ objdump -dr r.o

        r.o:     file format elf64-x86-64


        Disassembly of section .text:

        0000000000000000 <foo>:
           0:   c3                      retq   

        0000000000000001 <_start>:
           1:   e8 00 00 00 00          callq  6 <_start+0x5>
                                2: R_X86_64_PC32        foo-0x4
        $ ld-new -o r r.o
        $ readelf -S r
        There are 8 section headers, starting at offset 0xf0:

        Section Headers:
          [Nr] Name              Type             Address           Offset
               Size              EntSize          Flags  Link  Info  Align
          [ 0]                   NULL             0000000000000000  00000000
               0000000000000000  0000000000000000           0     0     0
          [ 1] .rela.plt         RELA             00000000004000b0  000000b0
               0000000000000000  0000000000000018   A       0     2     8
          [ 2] .plt              PROGBITS         00000000004000b0  000000b0
               0000000000000000  0000000000000000  AX       0     0     4
          [ 3] .text             PROGBITS         00000000004000b0  000000b0
               0000000000000006  0000000000000000  AX       0     0     4
          [ 4] .got.plt          PROGBITS         00000000006000b8  000000b8
               0000000000000000  0000000000000000  WA       0     0     8
          [ 5] .shstrtab         STRTAB           0000000000000000  000000b8
               0000000000000034  0000000000000000           0     0     1
          [ 6] .symtab           SYMTAB           0000000000000000  000002f0
               00000000000000f0  0000000000000018           7     5     8
          [ 7] .strtab           STRTAB           0000000000000000  000003e0
               0000000000000024  0000000000000000           0     0     1
        Key to Flags:
          W (write), A (alloc), X (execute), M (merge), S (strings)
          I (info), L (link order), G (group), x (unknown)
          O (extra OS processing required) o (OS specific), p (processor 
specific)
        $