From owner-freebsd-arch Sat Nov 11 10:55: 4 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from ns.yogotech.com (ns.yogotech.com [206.127.123.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 41E8F37B479; Sat, 11 Nov 2000 10:55:01 -0800 (PST) Received: from nomad.yogotech.com (nomad.yogotech.com [206.127.123.131]) by ns.yogotech.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA22752; Sat, 11 Nov 2000 11:54:59 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from nate@nomad.yogotech.com) Received: (from nate@localhost) by nomad.yogotech.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA04008; Sat, 11 Nov 2000 11:54:58 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from nate) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 11:54:58 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <200011111854.LAA04008@nomad.yogotech.com> From: Nate Williams MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Mike Smith Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, dillon@earth.backplane.com Subject: Re: The shared /bin and /sbin bikeshed In-Reply-To: <200011110315.eAB3Fp909237@mass.osd.bsdi.com> References: <200011110257.eAB2vj034258@vashon.polstra.com> <200011110315.eAB3Fp909237@mass.osd.bsdi.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.34 under 19.16 "Lille" XEmacs Lucid Reply-To: nate@yogotech.com (Nate Williams) Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > But to keep things in perspective, saving RAM isn't really the main > > advantage of shared libraries. Their value lies in other areas. They > > save a lot of disk space; they allow bugs to be fixed in many programs > > at once via the installation of a single repaired library; and they > > provide the flexibility of run-time modules ("plug-ins"), which are > > used by more and more software packages these days. > > It would be interesting to know whether the speed overhead (if any) for > PIC code is offset by the improved cache behaviour as well. Benchmarks done early on tend to say that using PIC code is 10-15% slower than not. For awhile, GCC's internal compiler libraries were compiled shared, but the speedups from compiling them static were significant enough to show static linking is *significantly* faster than shared linking, even if you remove the startup issues. My own benchmarks show (pre-ELF) this as well. Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message