Re: [MiNT] ELF object linking

[Peter Slegg <p.slegg@scubadivers.co.uk>]

On Wed, 26 Feb 2014 22:57:00 , Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr> wrote:
> On 26/02/2014 21:46, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> > Couldn't that in some cases improve instruction
> > cache utilization?
>
> It does.
>
> With ELF, assembler instructions and read-only data are separated in 2
> different areas (.text and .rodata). This is optimal since the instruction
> cache gets filled with instructions only, and the data cache only with data.
>
> With our current a.out implementation, assembler instructions and read-only
> data are mixed in the same area (.text). As a result, both caches are
> partially filled with both instructions and data, wasting space, therefore
> performance.
>
> However, I don't know how much performance gain we could get with that.
> Probably nothing extraordinary.
>

Thanks Vincent, it was worth asking just to learn something like that.

I have heard people say that C++ produces fatware but at least this ELF-like
approach could remove that issue.

Peter