Heads up on binutils214

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Mon Feb 2 08:08:04 PST 2004


:Is there any advantage to writing a version of binutils under a BSD
:license?
:
:I've never been terribly happy with the binutils linker; right now,
:it's the bottleneck in a couple of projects here at work -- lack of
:incremental linking, 50 MB of object files, and an overloaded NFS
:server means that, if you change anything, you might as well go get
:a cup of coffee and take your time about it.
:
:So a new linker is moving up the priority list for me.  (Hm, is this
:what they meant when they docked me on my performance review for "can
:stray if something more interesting comes along"? <g>)
:
:Dave
    
    There is not really any advantage in writing your own linker.  Gnu's
    LD does support a form of pre-linking via '-r', which you can try using
    to bundle large blocks of object files together before doing a final
    link.  It is also possible to combine files together into libraries (.a)
    and then link a fewer number of objects against the generated libraries.
    And, finally, you may be able to order the object files within the link
    line to reduce the number of symbols floating around and improve link
    performance.  ld -r is your best bet, though.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>





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