ld -F

[John R. MacMillan]

In article <422 at manta.pha.pa.us> brant at manta.pha.pa.us (Brant Cheikes) writes:
|I'd like to know what the -F ld option really does, and why it's
|useful.  When you RTFM for ld(1), you see "-F: like -z but takes less
|disk space and can page faster into memory [...] The -F option is on
|by default" (User's Manual, Vol II).  But I know that the -F option is
|NOT on by default.  I came across a bin file for which "file" said
|"(shared demand paged with shared library) -F (0413 demand paged)".
|The man page, under the FILES section, lists /lib/ifile.0413-F, but
|there is no such file in MY /lib.  What's the deal here?

As near as I can tell, it's the "default" if you put /lib/crt0s.o
/lib/shlib.ifile _AFTER_ the other objects on the ld command line.

I think the idea behind it is that the text and data sections are set
up so that they can be paged into memory directly from the a.out.  I
don't know if this is really any faster or not.  Anybody ever done any
timings?

|Note to CCC script writers: If we can really link using -F, and it's
|really better than the default (-z, apparently), then why not fix CCC
|to give ld the -F option unless contraindicated?

One called "ccs" does this (that's where I learned the trick), and I
changed my copy of ccc.
--
John R. MacMillan
jrmacmillan at lily.waterloo.edu		If the universe fits, wear it.
..!watmath!lily!jrmacmillan