I have written a fairly major set of changes to the `ps' command, which is available as: http://people.freebsd.org/~gad/ps-susv3.diff
Debate/discussion about the changes themselves actual changes should be going on in the freebsd-standards mailing list. So for purposes of this mailing list, please ignore most of that.
But while doing it, I was somewhat obsessed about making sure that my changes wouldn't cause a dramatic increase in the size of the executable for `ps'. Due to that, I tripped over one example of "code" vs "object-code produced" which makes no sense to me. So, consider just this section of the update (with some reformatting so it is easy to see the code):
char elemcopy[PATH_MAX];
...do stuff...
#if !defined(ADD_PS_LISTRESET)
inf->addelem(inf, elemcopy);
#else
/*
* We now have a single element. Add it to the
* list, unless the element is ":". In that case,
* reset the list so previous entries are ignored.
*/
if (strcmp(elemcopy, ":") == 0)
inf->count = 0;
else
inf->addelem(inf, elemcopy);
#endifNow, here is what I noticed:
* XXX - Adding this check increases the total size of `ps' by
* 3940 bytes on i386! That's 12% of the entire program!
* { using gcc (GCC) 3.3.3 [FreeBSD] 20031106 }
*
* When compiling for sparc, adding this option causes NO
* change in the size of the `ps' executable. And on alpha,
* adding this option adds only 8 bytes to the executable.So, by adding one call to strcmp() to check for a ":" string, I end up with /bin/ps (the stripped-object-file) which has grown by 12.6% !! This is for a program which is almost 2500 lines spread out over 5 '.c'-files. How is that possible? What am I missing here?
I am not a compilier guru, so I suspect it would take me hours to pin this down. I don't want to do that, so I'm wondering if anyone understands how such a minor code-change can POSSIBLY cause such a huge change in resulting object file... I also wonder if this same issue pops up in other programs, too.
-- Garance Alistair Drosehn = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
