Chris Wedgwood wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 11:24:10PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> Because 100 4K drivers suddenly becomes 0.5Mb. There are those of
> us trying to stuff Linux into embedded devices who if anything
> want more configuration options not people taking stuff out.
>
> Well, I'm more or less in agreement here, especially when working with
> small embedded devices which have a few (say 16 or 32) MB of RAM for
> EVERYTHING, kernel, userspace AND filesystems.
>
> However, I wonder if we can't have the linker remove unnecessary and
> unreferences objects, functions and variables?
We can. Graham Stoney had all this going against 2.2. See
http://www.google.com/search?q=stoney+ffunction-sections&hl=en&start=10&sa=N
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/Year-2000/2000-29/0415.html
> What I'd much rather see if this is an issue is:
>
> bool 'Do you want to customise for a very small system'
>
> _IF_ the linker can remove things, it would simplify this too --- we
> could if a few important places produce code slightly differently to
> favour speed over size and not reference various things. Also, the
> above option would turn-off inlining as that seems to makie quite a
> difference at times (BTW, I'm not sure about this, but it seems gcc
> and C99 don't agree with static/extern inline semantics?)
The kernel doesn't link when you compile with -fno-inline because of all
the `extern inline' qualifiers. These need to be converted to `static
inline'. Jim Houston has a script which does this. See
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0201.3/0888.html
It would be rather good if we could get that script run across the
tree - no-inline has its uses at times.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 07 2002 - 21:00:20 EST