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Re: Only compress debug sections if this saves space
- From: Cary Coutant <ccoutant at google dot com>
- To: Rainer Orth <ro at cebitec dot uni-bielefeld dot de>
- Cc: Binutils <binutils at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 13:26:40 -0700
- Subject: Re: Only compress debug sections if this saves space
- References: <ydd1u9f9cnv dot fsf at lokon dot CeBiTec dot Uni-Bielefeld dot DE>
> The warning is correct and easy to fix, as shown by the following
> patch. In the testcase above, only one out of three debug sections
> shrinks when compressing. I've chosen to adapt the .d file to account
> for this and didn't try to create a larger testcase where all debug
> sections do compress.
My original rationale for always compressing was that (a) the
compressed section would be larger than the uncompressed only for
trivially-small sections to begin with, so the net savings of
bothering to check is minimal; and (b) it makes testing more
difficult, as a random unrelated change might cause the section to
fall under the threshold and suddenly it's not compressed (as you've
already noticed).
HJ made a change so that it would only compress the section if it was
larger than the size of the compression header, but I believe he made
a deliberate decision not to make it conditional on the final size for
the above reasons.
I'm not really opposed to this change -- I just want to consider the
cost (it makes testing more fragile) vs. the benefit (which seems
fairly minimal). If you go ahead, I'd argue that you probably should
try to make the testcase large enough so that all the debug sections
compress.
-cary