--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 9:39 PM Aurelien Jarno <aurel...@aurel32.net> wrote: > We are at a point were we should probably look for a real solution > instead of relying on tricks. *sigh* i _have_ been pointing out for several years now that this is a situation that is going to get increasingly worse and worse, leaving perfectly good hardware only fit for landfill. i spoke to Dr Stallman about the lack of progress here: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22831 he expressed some puzzlement as the original binutils algorithm was perfectly well capable of handling linking with far less resident memory than was available at the time - and did *NOT*, just like gcc - assume that virtual memory was "the way to go". this because the algorithm used in ld was written at a time when virtual memory was far from adequate. then somewhere in the mid-90s, someone went "4GB is enough for anybody" and ripped the design to shreds, making the deeply flawed and short-sighted assumption that application linking would remain - forever - below 640k^H^H^H^H4GB. now we're paying the price. the binutils-gold algorithm (with options listed in the bugreport, a is *supposed* to fix this, however the ld-torture test that i created shows that the binutils-gold algorithm is *also* flawed: it probably uses mmap when it is in *no way* supposed to. binutils with the --no-keep-memory option actually does far better than binutils-gold... in most circumstances. however it also spuriously fails with inexplicable errors. basically, somebody needs to actually properly take responsibility for this and get it fixed. the pressure will then be off: linking will take longer *but at least it will complete*. i've written the ld-torture program - a random function generator - so that it can be used to easily generate large numbers of massive c source files that will hit well over the 4GB limit at link time. so it's easily reproducible. l. p.s. no, going into virtual memory is not acceptable. the cross-referencing instantly creates a swap-thrash scenario, that will put all and any builds into 10 to 100x the completion time. any link that goes into "thrash" will take 2-3 days to complete instead of an hour. "--no-keep-memory" is supposed to fix that, but it is *NOT* an option on binutils-gold, it is *ONLY* available on the *original* binutils-ld.
