Re: how interesting are data->bss patches?

From: Tigran Aivazian (tigran@veritas.com)
Date: Sun Sep 24 2000 - 10:52:44 EST


Hi Peter,

The question you ask can be answered trivially - yes, it is definitely a
good idea, please make such a patch. But what is far from being trivial is
the magic reg. expression that is capable of catching all "globals
initialized to 0 or NULL". It would be very useful if you showed everyone
how you did it. I seriously thought of "simply" reading entire 2279844
lines of C code to catch all "data->bss" cases but if you can have grep(1)
do that for me then that may save quite a lot of time :)

Regards,
Tigran

 On Sat, 23 Sep 2000, Peter Samuelson wrote:

>
> Not that any of us who don't do embedded projects ought to care very
> much, but I was curious. I grepped test9pre6 for globals initialized
> to 0 or NULL and came up with 2495 lines, first iteration. At 4-byte
> alignment this works out to something over 9k of .data that should be
> .bss (not that anyone compiles very much of this in at a time).
>
> A lot of recent Linus patches seem to have this conversion in them, so
> it seems someone *does* care about image size. (Presumably people
> running the kernel in-place from flash, right?) Would anyone be
> interested in patches to uninitialize these variables? I'd be willing
> to proofread my grep output.
>
> (A related question: __initdata *does* have to be initialized, right?)
>
> Peter
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