Re: [PATCH] blackfin: Cleanup linker script using new linker script macros.

[Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 16:26, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 11:58:01AM -0400, Tim Abbott wrote:
>> On Tue, 15 Sep 2009, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> > the larger padding in the initramfs is kind of annoying as i cant see
>> > any need to pad it to PAGE_SIZE.  since the initramfs is released with
>> > the rest of the init section, it doesnt need whole pages.  a quick
>> > test shows that it does waste a few kb in reality.  default build for
>> > BF533-STAMP for example shows 0x1000 difference.
>> >
>> > in terms of correctness, this change misses a reference to the now
>> > deleted .init.ramfs:
>> > -       .init.ramfs :
>> > -       {
>> > -       .....
>> > -       }
>> > -
>> >        .text_l1 L1_CODE_START : AT(LOADADDR(.init.ramfs) + SIZEOF(.init.ramfs))
>> >
>> > so that .text_l1 needs to updated to refer to the new section before
>> > it (.exit.data in this case).  once i make that change, the resulting
>> > link looks the same (minus the initramfs thing mentioned earlier), and
>> > it does boot.
>>
>> OK.  I guess we should plan to modify the INIT_DATA_SECTION macro to add
>> another argument specifying an alignment level for .init.ramfs.  It'd be
>> inconvenient to add that right now since there are a lot of patches in
>> linux-next or otherwise in flight that introduce uses of
>> INIT_DATA_SECTION, and those patches would all be broken by changing this
>> now.  Once the dust settles on that for this release, I'll submit a patch
>> adding said argument to INIT_DATA_SECTION.
>
> But this is all discarded during runtime so the added alignment has no cost in the end - no?

once things are booted, there should be no difference.  but
storage/boot costs increase (you have to store/extract/copy that extra
data).  you know how miserly we embedded people like to be ;).
-mike