I'm trying to identify the largest symbols in an .elf file for each memory section (.text, .data, .bss). So far I'm using GNU nm to get the largest symbols:
nm foo.elf --size-sort --reverse-sort --radix=d --demangle --line-numbers
Is there a builtin way in nm to filter the ouput by section or do I need to resort to text filtering?
nm outputs a section type for every symbol as single letter code (B: .bss, D: .data, T: .text), but there seems no way to filter by symbol type.
Background: The code runs on a microcontroller which is able to execute instruction directly from flash memory. The instructions from the .text section stay in the flash memory during execution, .bss and .data are loaded into the RAM. That's way I would like to be able to identify the largest symbols in each section independently.
there seems no way to filter by symbol type.
Just use grep to perform any filtering you may need.
You may also want to look at Bloaty McBloatface: a size profiler for binaries.