Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 14:09:33 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: "Julian Stacey" <jhs@jhs.muc.de>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ELF rtld and environment variables... Message-ID: <200007262009.OAA31834@harmony.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 26 Jul 2000 13:01:02 PDT." <200007262001.NAA39194@mass.osd.bsdi.com> References: <200007262001.NAA39194@mass.osd.bsdi.com>
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In message <200007262001.NAA39194@mass.osd.bsdi.com> Mike Smith writes: : Typically, the loss of the ability to demand-page from a gzipped : executable is a worse detracting factor than the space saving makes up : for. This is one reason that Timing Solutions runs all of its small systems out of uncompressed flash or Disk On Chip. We thought about saving a little money and going to 8MB or 16MB parts rather than 64M parts and decompressing into memory, but some simple exeriments that I did showed that this savings would be offset by needing more RAM to hold the entire decompressed image. Much of the stuff we have on our CF parts is needed only for boot or configuration, so it turns out that only a small part of the binaries need to be in RAM at any given time. The price difference between either the 8MB or 16M and 64M CF part is something like $80. The price for an additional 32MB of ram is about $70-$80, give or take in the 72pin SIMMs that we have on our boards. Given our volumes, it didn't make sense to spend the 50 or so hours needed to make a compressed solution bulletproof, plus the unknown amount of time that a compressed solution causes for updates and patches. Even if we did 100 units, that's only $1000, which, counting overhead, is like 5-10 hours of somebody's time, which is far below the cost it would take to engineer the solution, plus build process additions, upgrade hassles, etc. The .gz files would solve only the upgrade hassle issue, while leaving the other issues in place. Each company has its own cost/benefit analysis for these things. So far none of them have seen enough of a benefit to .gz executables to implement them for elf. Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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