On Mon, 1 May 2000, Graham Stoney wrote:
> In a discussion about Linux kernel optimisations, Russell King writes:
> > Oh, if any of the mm people are reading this, what about killing the
> > redundant zero initialisers so that these variables can be placed in
> > the BSS?
>
> Even better, is there any way to get gcc to treat static and extern variables
> with explicit all-bits-zero initializers as though they had no initializers?
>
> In other words, treat these the same:
> static int initialised=0; /* wastes space in .data */
> static int uninitialised; /* implicitly zero, and more efficient */
>
> This would be useful for all space-conscious environments where the user
> knows that .bss is zero-filled. Variables with redundant explicit zero
> initializers are effectively wasting .data space, but some programmer like
> to use them anyway.
# cd /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/kernel
# grep -i surprise *S
head.S: * Clear BSS first so that there are no surprises...
as you see, it has been done explicitly by the kernel, regardless of what
gcc may have prepared.
Regards,
Tigran
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