Why is .bss so big?

[Anthony Green]

I've just had a quick look at some .jar.so files and I don't understand
something.

For instance, if I look at gnu-crypto-2.0.1.jar.so, built with gcj 4.1
in FC rawhide, size tells me that .bss is 55136 bytes.

However, objdump only tells me about 312 symbols in .bss, virtually all
of which are only 4 bytes large.  There are only two symbols larger, and
they're both 8 bytes.

So why is .bss so large?

AG