There's some strange bug in glibc that triggers if you combine the

--gc-sections linker flag with static linking.  If this happens, then
the "stdout" variable (used by printf() and such) will only work if stdout
is _not_ redirected.  I.E "./busybox" prints stuff, but "./busybox | cat"
does not produce any output.  (But even when redirected, "write(1,"blah",4);"
continues to work just fine.)

This is clearly a glibc bug, but to avoid triggering it I've moved the
--gc-sections flag so it only gets added when we're not statically linking.
If somebody would like to go poke Ulrich Drepper, you can trivially reproduce
this with a "hello world" program, ala:

  gcc -static -Wl,--gc-sections hello.c &&  (./a.out | cat)

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/Rules.mak b/Rules.mak
index a99d42bef..e4ac81705 100644
--- a/Rules.mak
+++ b/Rules.mak
@@ -267,8 +267,6 @@ ifeq ($(strip $(CONFIG_DEBUG)),y)
     CFLAGS +=-g
 else
     CFLAGS +=-DNDEBUG
-    CHECKED_LDFLAGS += $(call check_ld,$(LD),--sort-common,)
-    CHECKED_LDFLAGS += $(call check_ld,$(LD),--gc-sections,)
 endif
 
 ifneq ($(strip $(CONFIG_DEBUG_PESSIMIZE)),y)
@@ -288,6 +286,11 @@ endif
 STRIPCMD:=$(call check_strip,$(STRIP),-s --remove-section=.note --remove-section=.comment,$(STRIP))
 ifeq ($(strip $(CONFIG_STATIC)),y)
     PROG_CFLAGS += $(call check_cc,$(CC),-static,)
+else
+    ifneq ($(strip $(CONFIG_DEBUG)),y)
+        CHECKED_LDFLAGS += $(call check_ld,$(LD),--sort-common,)
+        CHECKED_LDFLAGS += $(call check_ld,$(LD),--gc-sections,)
+    endif
 endif
 CFLAGS_SHARED := $(call check_cc,$(CC),-shared,)
 LIB_CFLAGS+=$(CFLAGS_SHARED)