Hi Rich

First of all thank you for the work your doing with the musl C library. Fantastic.
Compared to others I'm quite new to Linux but even I see, that there's far too much bloated software around.
Looking at some projects - e.g. GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) - I see black for the programmer's future. At some point it will become unmaintainable, if it isn't already...
I think that what you are doing with the C library is essential for the future of Linux and other open source OS's and should be done with most other software around today... Keep up the work!

At the moment I'm trying to get my homeserver project running. First I went with Alpine Linux but ran into some - at least for me at that point - unsolvable problems.
So I decided to give the Linux from Scratch idea another chance. A year back I already tried to build a musl toolchain from scratch but failed due to lack of knowledge and time...
This time it looks like I'm getting it done - but we'll see. ;-)

During bootstrapping and compiling the first parts of the toolchain against musl I noticed two things. Maybe they're already known to you...
(A search function for the mailing list would be a nice thing...)



First: Compiling GCC 5.2.0 (and also 4.9.3) with musl 1.1.11 toolchain I get a lot of warnings about missing sentinels in function calls. Compiling GCC (same versions) with glibc toolchain there's no such warning at all.
Replacing the function call sentinels 'NULL' with '(char *)NULL' in the affected source code of GCC makes the warnings disappear.

My question: Does the reason for these warnings have some impact on the health of the toolchain (is there something wrong?) or are they just a byproduct of the correctness and standards-conformance of musl?



Second: Compiling with a musl 1.1.11, GCC 5.2.0 (and 4.9.3), Binutils 2.25.1 toolchain I get the following info (warning) over an over again:

...ld: copy reloc against protected `stdout' is dangerous
...ld: copy reloc against protected `stdin' is dangerous
...ld: copy reloc against protected `stderr' is dangerous

Same can be seen in Alpine Linux build logs: e.g. http://build.alpinelinux.org/buildlogs/build-edge-x86_64/main/patchutils/patchutils-0.3.4-r0.log

Reason for these "warnings" seems to be a change in the linker from binutils version 2.25 to 2.25.1.
Lines 2677 to 2680 in 'binutils-2.25.1/bfd/elflink.c' are new and in my opinion the source of the issued warning.
My C knowledge is minimal but as far as I can tell this means that the problem - if there is one at all - was already there before binutils version 2.25.1, the linker just did not print the "warning".

I haven't seen this warning before using glibc. So i guess it has to be musl-related.

What do you think? Is there a problem or can I ignore these warnings?


Some additional info:
I'm building on x86_64 for x86_64 using Alpine Linux 3.2.3 as host.


Thank you for the help - much appreciated.

Ruben Winistörfer