Effects of deleting the entire symbol table and moving information from an executable?

Question

Compiling using gcc -s and the Unix strip delete the entire character table and move information from the executable (reducing its size).

Could this affect the operation of the executable? Do some operating systems that run ASLR need this information? If not, then why store them first?

Detailed description below would be helpful.

Answer 1

It seems pretty obvious that deleting relocation information will interfere with ASLR.

However, I took a look at man strip on a couple of my systems, and none of them suggests that strip (or indeed can) delete the movement data. This mainly concerns the removal of debugging symbols.