I moved an EDK project I have from V8.1i back to V7.1i When I compiled my software, the elf was twice the size and overflowed the BRAM. I fixed the problem with the "-ffunction-sections -Wl,--gc-sections" options documented in Xilinx AnswerRecord 21533.
But I found no references to a change of this sort from V7 -> V8. Is this to be expected? Anyone else notice this? It seems odd, given that the GNU compiler version is the same (3.4.1)