-profile-use: "has overflowed" error

[Michael Veksler <VEKSLER at il dot ibm dot com>]

While trying to do profiled based optimization with gcc-3.4, I got the 
following error:
        $ g++ -O2 -Werror -c -DNDEBUG -fprofile-use file.cpp
        file.cpp:1: error `file.gcda' has overflowed
        $ g++ -v
        Reading specs from 
/home/veksler/gcc/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.0/specs
        Configured with: ../gcc-3.4.0-20040406/configure 
--prefix=/home/veksler/gcc --enable-languages=c++
        Thread model: posix
        gcc version 3.4.0 20040407 (prerelease)

Is it normal behavior in some cases or is it a bug in gcc-3.4?
I guess that I can remove file.gcda, and go on with the compilation, but 
that is a major incontinence in an automated build system.
I tried to look this up in gcc.gnu.org search. All I could find was a 
patch by Jan Hubicka on Dec 2003, that made this error more informative 
than it used to be (and produced an error instead of a plain warning).

My guess is that some of the profiling counters are 32 bit, and my code 
(which runs many seconds) covers the same arc too many times. In that 
case, it is a bug in profiling code. I think that either the counters 
should be 64 bit (which may be too expensive), or they should not wrap 
around (and stop at  (~(counter_type)0) ).

Am I correct? Should I open a PR?
I can't send offending code because:
 1. It is too big
 2. I am not allowed to.
I could and try to reproduce it in a special test case - if I knew what 
the error was about.