Joe Buck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > So the basic issue is this: why the hell does the linker need so much > memory? Sure, if you have tons available, it pays to trade memory for > time, mmap everything, then build all the hashes you want to look up > relationships in every direction. But if it doesn't really fit, it's > a big lose. Ideally ld, ar and the like could detect and adapt if there > isn't enough physical memory to hold everything.
At present the linker provides command line options --no-keep-memory and --reduce-memory-overheads to significantly reduce the amount of memory required during the link. It should be possible in principle to partially adapt to available memory based on, e.g., physmem_total. The linker could keep track of how much memory it has allocated via bfd_alloc and bfd_malloc. If that total gets to be 75% of physmem_total, or something like that, the linker could switch to --no-keep-memory. Unfortunately the decisions made by --reduce-memory-overhead apply at the start of the link. At that time it is difficult to tell how much memory will be needed. Ian
