Re: [PATCH] lib/lz4: make arrays static const, reduces object code size

Arnd Bergmann
2017-09-22T21:39:15Z

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 9:17 PM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 7:21 PM, Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2017-09-22 at 09:48 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>> On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 1:11 AM, Colin Ian King
>
>>> text data bss dec hex filename
>>> 18220 176 0 18396 47dc build/tmp/lib/lz4/lz4_decompress-after.o
>>> 22297 0 0 22297 5719 build/tmp/lib/lz4/lz4_decompress-before.o
>>
>> Perhaps not so much a gcc bug as an opportunity
>> for gcc to add an additional optimization.
>>
>> gcc would have to verify that the const array is
>> not initialized with some variable or argument like:
>>
>> int foo(int a)
>> {
>> const int array[] = {1, a};
>> ...
>> }
>
> It depends. With a 10KB different in .text size, my guess is that this
> is a case where gcc does the right optimization in principle, but
> fails to do what was intended in some corner cases.

I found the problem: "gcc -fsanitze=kernel-address --param asan-stack=1"
produces lots of expensive checks here with gcc-5 or higher.

Disabling it makes a big difference:

upstream:
gcc-7.0.0 --fsanitze=kernel-address --param asan-stack=1: 31789 bytes
gcc-7.0.0: 16535 bytes

patched:
gcc-7.0.0 --fsanitze=kernel-address --param asan-stack=1: 20351 bytes
gcc-7.0.0: 14490 bytes

Arnd