Martin J. Bligh wrote:
>>Due to the final link and compress stage, there is a fair amount of idle
>>time at the end of the run. Its going to be hard to push that number
>>lower by adding cpus.
>
> I think we need to fix the final phase .... anyone got any ideas
> on parallelizing that?
The final linking stage in the makefile looks like this:
vmlinux: piggy.o $(OBJECTS)
$(LD) $(ZLINKFLAGS) -o vmlinux $(OBJECTS) piggy.o
ld has a "-r" option
`--relocateable'
Generate relocatable output---i.e., generate an output
file that can in turn serve as input to `ld'. This is
often called partial linking. As a side effect, in
environments that support standard Unix magic numbers,
this option also sets the output file's magic number
to `OMAGIC'. If this option is not specified, an
absolute file is produced. When linking C++ programs,
this option will not resolve references to construc
tors; to do that, use -Ur.
If we link in chunks, we can parallelize this.
Image 26 object files: [a-z].o
ld -r -o abcd.o [abcd].o
ld -r -o efgh.o [efgh].o
...
ld -r -o abcdefgh.o {abcd,efgh,...}.o
then, instead of the old final link stage:
$(LD) $(ZLINKFLAGS) -o vmlinux {abcdefgh,...}.o piggy.o
The final link will still take a while, but we will have at least broken
up SOME of the work. I'm going to see if this will actually work now.
Any comments?
-- Dave Hansen haveblue@us.ibm.com- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 15 2002 - 22:00:15 EST