On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Roman Divacky wrote:
Log:
Some more shrinking.
...
o kname is explicitly initialized in main() as BSS
in boot2 is not zeroed
Not zeroing the bss is very fragile and broken, and would save a negative
amount of space once other bugs are fixed:
- many other variables depend on the BSS being zeroed. One is the critical
`opts' variable -- this is only accessed by read-modify-write instructions
which always read garbage unless the BSS is zeroed.
- -fno-zero-initialized-in-bss is missing in CFLAGS. This confuses naive
compilers into believing that the BSS actually works so that it is safe
for them to translate bogus explicit initializations to zero like
`char *kname = NULL;' from zero-data in the data section to
implicitly-zeroed data in the BSS.
- fixing CFLAGS gives no change in boot2.o, except in the old version with
"char *kname = NULL;" it moves kname from the BSS to the data section,
thus expanding boot2.o by 4 bytes.
- initializing kname in main() takes a lot of code (10 bytes). 10 is
because the code is pessimized for space. It is "movl $0,kname".
Good code in main() would take 7 bytes for the first zero-initialized
variable and 5 bytes for each additional one
("xorl %eax,%eax; movl %eax,kname; movl %eax,opts; ..."). But this
would still be bad code. It takes 15 bytes for 2 variables and may miss
many. Initializing the whole BSS would takes at most 14 bytes for
"movl $edata,%edi; movl $end-edata,%ecx; xorl %eax,%eax; rep stosb"
(less if %eax is already 0 (only need %al) or the 0 in it or %ecx can
be reused; less if the high word of %edi or %ecx is already 0 so that
only the low word needs to be loaded).
Bruce
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