Re: New (now current development process)

Dave Jones
2005-11-02T17:49:20Z

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 07:54:04AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> > For your last suggestion, maybe someone can automate running Andi's
> > bloat-o-meter? I think the hard part is maintaining comparable configs.
>
> Yes. And we should probably make -Os the default. Apparently Fedora
> already does that by just forcibly hacking the Kconfig files.

(excuse any typos, this wireless connection is god-awful)
We do. We rip out the dependancyon CONFIG_EMBEDDED, and build
with OPTIMISE_FOR_SIZE set. At least we usually do.
Once every so often, we hit something which throws a spanner
in the works, like the "x86-64 doesn't boot any more" problem
that was fixed by the patch that Alexandre posted earlier
this week.

Most of the time now, when we hit bugs with -Os, it seems to be due
to broken asm constraints in the kernel rather than actual
gcc bugs, but of course, they also occur from time to time,
whereas the same code works just fine with -O2.
I think part of th reason for this is exactly because it
doesn't get a great deal of testing.

Dave