On Monday 12 December 2011, Mel Gorman wrote:

The bloat exists either way. I don't believe the linker strips it out so
overall it would make more sense to depend on compaction to keep the
vmstat counters for debugging reasons if nothing else. It's not
something I feel very strongly about though.

There were some previous attempts to use -fgc-sections to strip out
unused functions from the kernel, but I think they were never merged
because of regressions.

	Arnd