Re: 1.3.100: My notes, as usual

Eric Youngdale (eric@aib.com)
Wed, 5 Jun 1996 07:43:38 -0400

>Actually, we could do something like this. I think it was Alan Cox (or
>possibly Eric Young) who first suggested that we could use the gcc
>attribute feature to put certain procedure into a separate ELF section,
>so that at the end of the boot sequence, those pages could be
>marked as being reusable. It would require doing some GCC-specific
>features, but it shouldn't require any special as or ld hacks.

Yeah, and I actually worked up some diffs to start to do this.
I uncovered some ld bugs in the process :-(. All I did was to try putting
some functions in a different ELF section - I never tried actually releasing
the pages to the memory manager (but this wouldn't be hard).

It isn't a huge amount of memory that you would save, but there
definitely is something. Probably in the neighborhood of 50-200K depending
upon what you have configured into your kernel.

-Eric

-- 
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  But I have promises to keep,
And lines to code before I sleep, And lines to code before I sleep."