Re: [ECOS] strange size issue (i386 vs ARM)

[Mandeep Sandhu <mandeepsandhu.chd@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Bart Veer <bartv@ecoscentric.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "Mandeep" == Mandeep Sandhu <mandeepsandhu.chd@gmail.com> writes:
>
>    Mandeep> Look at the size output for the _same_ app compiled with
>    Mandeep> the Linux Synthetic target:
>
>    Mandeep> $ i386-elf-size myapp
>    Mandeep>    text       data     bss     dec     hex filename
>    Mandeep>  103690       7328 8381268 8492286  8194fe myapp
>
>    Mandeep> The text size of the ARM binary (~127KB) is
>    Mandeep> understandably larger than the i386 one (~102 KB).
>
>    Mandeep> But how come the data+bss value is so different!?!? The
>    Mandeep> i386 one is more than 8MB!
>
>    Mandeep> Is this expected? I'm still googling to find the answer.
>
> On real embedded targets the memory is physical. Not so on the
> synthetic target. Somehow or other the executable's ELF header info
> must tell the Linux OS to allocate 8MB of memory for the emulated
> target's RAM. Without that things like malloc() would not work, at
> least not without playing nasty games with mmap() at run-time. The
> easiest way to make things work is to make it seem like data+bss
> occupy all of 8MB, irrespective of the application's actual static
> data requirements. The surplus over 8MB reported by size is likely to
> be const data and the like which the linker script places in the
> read-only code region.
>
> This could probably be fixed if it was really necessary, but it would
> be non-trivial and I don't recall anybody reporting the issue in the
> past. Generally memory usage on the synthetic target will not give an
> accurate indication of memory usage on real targets because of the
> need for much larger stack sizes etc. - I won't go into all the
> unpleasant details.

Thanks Bart. This explains it. It's not an issue for me, was just
curious to know.

Regards,
-mandeep

>
> Bart
>
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