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Shrink NSIS stubs and plugins with --gc-sections

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Stubs drop from ~117 KB to ~52 KB on x86 and from ~133 KB to ~51 KB on
x64, mostly by discarding unreferenced libuuid.a constants, and every
installer shrinks by as much. See the patch header for details.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
MarcroSoft
2026-10-20 12:56:20 +02:00
committed by Christopher Wellons
parent f915d8e464
commit c91d60b481
2 changed files with 51 additions and 0 deletions
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1
src/nsis/series
View File

@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
cross-makensis.patch
no-ansi.patch
nsisdl-winsock-errors.patch
size.patch

50
src/nsis/size.patch Normal file
View File

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
Discard unreferenced sections from NSIS stubs and plugins
Every installer carries a stub, and the GCC-built stubs were ~117 KB
(x86) and ~133 KB (x64). Most of that is unused GUIDs: for
IID_IShellLinkW and IID_IPersistFile the stub pulls in two large
members of mingw-w64's libuuid.a, around 4,000 GUIDs and property keys
in all. Nearly all are selectany definitions in their own .rdata$NAME
sections, so -Wl,--gc-sections discards the unreferenced ones, bringing
stubs to ~51-53 KB on both architectures. Plugins get it too, for ~9 KB
total.
-ffunction-sections gains nothing in the stubs, which have almost no
dead code, and only adds per-function padding. On x64 it would also
leave a bogus zero-length .pdata entry for each function it removes.
On x86 it lets the plugins drop unused pluginapi helpers, ~20 KB over
all plugins. x64 plugins only grow, because the default linker script
keeps all .pdata, which references every function.
Do not add -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables. On x86 there are no unwind
tables anyway (SJLJ), and on x64 it strips the stubs of unwind data
while they still host plugin code and call back into it: a plugin's
catch around a callback, or an unhandled-exception filter, would no
longer be reached. Nor -fdata-sections: GCC's mingw section naming puts
zero-initialized objects in .data$NAME, turning the stubs' large .bss
buffers into file data, megabytes in the bzip2 stub.
---
SCons/Config/gnu | 4 ++++
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)
--- a/SCons/Config/gnu
+++ b/SCons/Config/gnu
@@ -101,6 +101,7 @@
if not defenv['DEBUG']:
stub_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-Os']) # optimize for size
+ stub_env.Append(LINKFLAGS = ['-Wl,--gc-sections']) # discard unreferenced sections
stub_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-Wall']) # all warnings
stub_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-xc']) # force compile as c
stub_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-fno-strict-aliasing']) # not safe for strict aliasing
@@ -147,6 +148,9 @@
if not defenv['DEBUG']:
plugin_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-Os']) # optimize for size
+ plugin_env.Append(LINKFLAGS = ['-Wl,--gc-sections']) # discard unreferenced sections
+ if defenv['TARGET_ARCH'] == 'x86': # amd64 .pdata keeps every function
+ plugin_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-ffunction-sections']) # let gc drop unused functions
plugin_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-Wall']) # level 3 warnings
plugin_env.Append(CCFLAGS = ['-fno-strict-aliasing']) # not safe for strict aliasing