After using arm-none-eabi-gcc to build a file in ELF format, I am using arm-none-eabi-objcopy to create an S-record file. The command that my makefile runs is:
$(TOOLCHAIN)-objcopy --srec-len 10 -O srec "$<" "$@"
The makefile can build with various different settings - with debug symbols, with optimization, and with neither.
With some information such as my username removed, the output of ls -la after doing all three builds is:
-rw-r--r-- 1 4096 270330 Oct 12 18:13 outfile_Debug.mot
-rw-r--r-- 1 4096 825888 Oct 12 18:13 outfile_Debug.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 4096 270334 Oct 12 17:06 outfile_Default.mot
-rw-r--r-- 1 4096 465928 Oct 12 17:06 outfile_Default.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 4096 184776 Oct 12 19:02 outfile_Optimized.mot
-rw-r--r-- 1 4096 395672 Oct 12 19:02 outfile_Optimized.out
Now, I have read an unsourced claim that srec files canot contain debugging information, which would explain why the Default and Debug .mot files are roughly the same size while the corresponding .out file sizes differ enormously. But otherwise, the ELF file is a binary representation of the executable, while the S-record file uses hex strings in ASCII text, so surely it should be larger than the binary ELF file for a non-debug build?
