On the size of compiled kernels (was: Re: acquiring an interrupt for swim3 floppy driver)
On Apr 13 2005, Brad Boyer wrote:
> Also, ppc code is on average bigger than x86 code. It's just a property
> of the instruction set. The x86 uses variable sized opcodes, so some
> stuff is only one or two bytes. The ppc instruction set uses exactly 4
> bytes for everything.
Yes, that I knew (I tried learning some basic ppc assembly to help with the
xine team to make it work slightly better in my G3 powered iBook), but I
didn't think that the difference would be that much. Now that you mention
it, x86 has opcodes that can be just 1 byte long.
OTOH, PPCs have much more registers, which help a bit when calling
functions (I think, but perhaps not the sufficient to compensate for the
body of the functions).
Anyway, I guess that it is time to give the linux-tiny patch a try. I hope
that at least some parts of it work on PPC. For the readers who may not be
aware, the patch is available from <http://www.selenic.com/tiny-about/>.
Thank you very much for your comments, Rogério.
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