Re: gcc name bug?

[Philip Blundell <pb@nexus.co.uk>]

On Tue, 2002-02-12 at 22:20, Frederic Tessier wrote:
> We are not familiar with the intricate workings of the compiler,
> but this must have to do with an alignment problem when the
> executable is launched, as the changes typically occur when the
> name length is increased by 8 bytes. This is a serious bug since
> in our simple example it more than doubles the execution time
> when we choose a "bad" name!

Yes, this is almost certainly the cause of the problem.  The name of the
program is pushed onto the stack to form argv[0].  On i386 platforms,
there is a significant performance penalty if doubles are not 8-byte
aligned in memory.

I think the glibc in woody aligns the stack properly at program startup
to avoid this issue. 

p.