Re: reducing stack usage in v4l?

["Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdl.org>]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003 09:35:34 +0000
Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk> wrote:

| On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 10:15:52AM +0100, Gerd Knorr wrote:
| > But when looking at the disasm output it is obvious that it isn't true
| > (at least with gcc 3.2).  On the other hand it is common practice in
| > many drivers, there must be a reason for that, no?  Any chance this
| > used to work with older gcc versions?
| 
| I don't believe so - I seem to remember looking at gcc 2.95 and finding
| the same annoying behaviour.

Yes, that's what I'm seeing with 2.96 as well.

| > Not sure what is the best idea to fix that.  Don't like the kmalloc
| > idea that much.  The individual structs are not huge, the real problem
| > is that many of them are allocated and only few are needed.  Any
| > chance to tell gcc that it should allocate block-local variables at
| > the start block not at the start of the function?
| 
| Not a particularly clean idea, but maybe creating a union of the
| structures and putting that on the stack? (ie, doing what GCC should
| be doing in the first place.)

That's an idea.  Or make separate called functions for each ioctl and declare
the structures inside them?

--
~Randy


Here are some v4l structure sizes from gcc 2.96 on a P4:

sizeof video_audio: 40
sizeof video_buffer: 20
sizeof video_capability: 60
sizeof video_channel: 48
sizeof video_mbuf: 136
sizeof video_mmap: 16
sizeof video_picture: 14
sizeof video_tuner: 52
sizeof video_window: 32
sizeof v4l2_audio: 52
sizeof v4l2_buffer: 68
sizeof v4l2_capability: 104
sizeof v4l2_control: 8
sizeof v4l2_fmtdesc: 64
sizeof v4l2_format: 204
sizeof v4l2_framebuffer: 44
sizeof v4l2_frequency: 44
sizeof v4l2_input: 76
sizeof v4l2_queryctrl: 68
sizeof v4l2_requestbuffers: 20
sizeof v4l2_tuner: 84