tree 0083bec556d2c3bec35a909a35286c7aded24a56
parent 9d0ef4fd61693acd3741ab7ee544246cda1f8738
author Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@in.ibm.com> 1159573675 +0200
committer Andi Kleen <andi@basil.nowhere.org> 1159573675 +0200

[PATCH] Re-positioning the bss segment

[AK: This apparently broke some systems, but we need it to fix
a compile problem with old binutils and in theory the patch
is correct. So let's trying reenabling it again.]

o Currently bss segment is being placed somewhere in the middle (after .data)
  section and after bss lots of init section and data sections are coming.
  Is it intentional?

o One side affect of placing bss in the middle is that objcopy keeps the
  bss in raw binary image (vmlinux.bin) hence unnecessarily increasing
  the size of raw binary image. (In my case ~600K). It also increases
  the size of generated bzImage, though the increase is very small
  (896 bytes), probably a very high compression ratio for stream
  of zeros.

o This patch moves the bss at the end hence reducing the size of
  bzImage by 896 bytes and size of vmlinux.bin by 600K.

o This change benefits in the context of relocatable kernel patches. If
  kernel bss is not part of compressed data (vmlinux.bin) then it does
  not have to be decompressed and this area can be used by the decompressor
  for its execution hence keeping the memory requirements bounded and
  decompressor code does not stomp over any other data loaded beyond
  kernel image (As might be the case with bootloaders like kexec).

Signed-off-by: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>