I have decided to take the hardened profile for a spin on a couple of my 
edge servers.  I grabbed stage1-x86-hardened-2.6-2006.0.tar.bz2, verified 
the profile was set to profiles/hardened/x86/2.6/, did my bootstrap and 
emerge -e system.  Everything looks to have gone ok.

What I am curious about is the fact that I didn't really notice any special 
CFLAGS being used while everything was compiling.  Various documents tell 
me it is transparent, that the settings are read from the gcc spec file.  
Should I not be seeing cflags specific to hardened settings while 
everything is compiling?

gcc-config -l shows:

 [1] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.5 *
 [2] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.5-hardenednopie
 [3] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.5-hardenednopiessp
 [4] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.5-hardenednossp
 [5] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.5-vanilla

When I look in /etc/env.d/05gcc, nothing is set for GCC_SPECS:

PATH="/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.4.5"
ROOTPATH="/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.4.5"
MANPATH="/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/man"
INFOPATH="/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/info"
LDPATH="/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5"
GCC_SPECS=""

/etc/env.d/gcc/config points to i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.5, which contains:

PATH="/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.4.5"
ROOTPATH="/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.4.5"
LDPATH="/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5"
GCCBITS="32"
MANPATH="/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/man"
INFOPATH="/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/info"
STDCXX_INCDIR="g++-v3"

When I look at some of the other config files such as 
i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.5-hardenednopie, it defines a GCC_SPECS file:

PATH="/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.4.5"
ROOTPATH="/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.4.5"
LDPATH="/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5"
GCCBITS="32"
MANPATH="/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/man"
INFOPATH="/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/info"
STDCXX_INCDIR="g++-v3"
GCC_SPECS="/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/hardenednopie.specs"

So I guess my question is - how do I know everything is actually being 
compiled with the hardened specific flags?  A diff 
on /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/specs and hardened.specs shows no 
differences, is it safe to assume the default specs file is being used even 
though it is not being set anywhere in the environment?