LTO lto_priv duplicate symbol and the reason for it

[Navid Rahimi]

Hi GCC community,

I have a few questions that I am struggling to find an answer for:

a. Why does LTO generates a new symbol?
b. Why it does not replace the existing symbol, instead of creating a new one with "lto_priv.%d"  at the end of it [1]?
c. Can we assume the original symbol always will be removed? Or it is possible to have cases where we have _x_ and _x_.lto_priv.0 together in the final binary?


1. https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/lto/lto-partition.cc#L937 

Best wishes,
Navid.