Re: USE_MMAP

[Krister Walfridsson <cato@df.lth.se>]

On 12 Jun 1999, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> I didn't think anybody used USE_MMAP.  The last time I fiddled around
> with it (it was Ken who wrote it originally), the resulting linker was
> actually slower, so it didn't seem worth pushing it (this was on
> SunOS).  mmap always sounds good, but I don't think there is any
> inherent reason for it to be faster than file I/O, and BFD doesn't
> need any of the other advantages of using it.  Does the NetBSD
> toolchain run faster because of the use of USE_MMAP?

I don't know. The reason we enabled it was that our m68k ports couldn't
strip kernels with debug info due to the default process memory limit
being to low. USE_MMAP solved it (and mmap sounds like a reasonable thing
to use anyhow.)

> This could be fixed in a few possible ways.  Not using USE_MMAP would
> be the simplest.  Copying the minisymbols into an malloc storage block
> if USE_MMAP is defined would work, though it would not be very
> efficient.  Otherwise, I think the interface would have to be changed
> somehow.

Hmm... I'll inspect the other binutils programs to see if any other
is affected before I try to fix it...

   /Krister