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cc-option and as-option are almost the same; both pass the flag to
$(CC). The main difference is the cc-option stops before the assemble
stage (-S option) whereas as-option stops after (-c option).

I chose -S because it is slightly faster, but $(cc-option,-gz=zlib)
returns a wrong result (https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/6/9/1529).
It has been fixed by commit 7b169944 ("Makefile: Improve compressed
debug info support detection"), but the assembler should always be
invoked for more reliable compiler option tests.

However, you cannot simply replace -S with -c because the following
code in lib/Kconfig.debug would break:

    depends on $(cc-option,-gsplit-dwarf)

The combination of -c and -gsplit-dwarf does not accept /dev/null as
output.

  $ cat /dev/null | gcc -gsplit-dwarf -S -x c - -o /dev/null
  $ echo $?
  0

  $ cat /dev/null | gcc -gsplit-dwarf -c -x c - -o /dev/null
  objcopy: Warning: '/dev/null' is not an ordinary file
  $ echo $?
  1

  $ cat /dev/null | gc...