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Date:      Mon, 18 Sep 2000 10:10:14 +0100 (BST)
From:      Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com>
To:        Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
Cc:        Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au>, "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, alpha@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Loader badly broken on the alpha 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0009180950390.86297-100000@salmon.nlsystems.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0009171808040.96606-100000@beppo.feral.com>

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On Sun, 17 Sep 2000, Matthew Jacob wrote:

> 
> 
> > Matthew Jacob wrote:
> > > 
> > > I think I had determined (I thought) that it was just loader itself, but I
> > > could be wrong.
> > 
> > The problem is that the loader is now too large, it cannot fit inside the
> > ~208K window that boot1 has got available to it.
> > 
> > peter@ashburton[12:14am]/home/obj/home/src/sys/boot/alpha/loader-130# nm loader.sym | sort | tail -1
> > 000000002003e190 A end
> > 
> > The VM space ends at 2004000.  I can't find where, but I was pretty sure that
> > the last 8K page was already spoken for and we've clobbered it.
> > 
> > Was the pnp stuff added to the Alpha loader images?  That is what probably
> > tipped it over the edge.
> 
> I've been looking at this a little bit. The last last 8k may not be entirely
> spoken for, because previous loader.sym's had:
> 
> 000000002003d260 A _end
> 000000002003d260 A end
> 
> 
> But if it's 8k (and I don't know anything much about this really- I have never
> delved to much into this portion of alphas) this may explain why the boot
> stuff never did work right entirely for all models (e.g., off of floppy for a
> rawhide).
> 
> In any case, this one is a hard one. I was comparing object sizes between June
> 23'd loader.sym and the current one on alpha, and there's no one single thing
> that got all that much bigger!
> 
> We need to pull out 3408 bytes- but it's not that simple- bcopy seems to take
> 2544 bytes, which is ridiculously large for a boot block- so I replaced it
> with a dopey one line C function but that didn't change _end for me, so I have
> to look at the linker magic some I guess.

Looking at sizes, supporting gzip'ed files is quite expensive - about 23k
of code and data. Ficl is the real heavyweight with 50k in words.o
alone. I just tried building everything with -Os but that was a
waste of time - only 784 bytes difference.

-- 
Doug Rabson				Mail:  dfr@nlsystems.com
Nonlinear Systems Ltd.			Phone: +44 20 8348 3944




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