Auditing the menuconfig help entries.

[Ricard Wanderlof]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2008, Rob Landley wrote:

>> On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 06:56:44PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
>>> Fiddling with menuconfig:
>>> ...

I must say I appreciate this thread; I also find a lot of the uClibc menu 
items to be incomprehensible, and the help texts are often of the type "if 
you don't understand what this does we won't tell you".

> I've looked at the LD man page, and although the "NOW" entry is fairly
> understandable:
>
>>            now
>>            When  generating  an  executable  or shared library, mark it
>> to tell the dynamic linker to resolve all symbols when the program is
>> started,  or  when  the  shared  library is linked to using dlopen,
>> instead of deferring function call  resolution  to  the point when the
>> function is first called.
>
> It doesn't even speculate about the advantages/disadvantages of actually doing
> it.

I would think that if all symbols are resolved at startup time, it means 
it will take longer for the program to start, but actual execution will be 
fast (and consistent). Resolving symbols when needed would decrease 
startup time and also decrease the total lookup time if only a few of the 
symbols are actually used in a given run (busybox springs to mind as this 
type of application, although I don't know how it works out in practice), 
at the expense of first-time-called function calls taking longer to 
execute, causing inconsistent delays during execution.

/Ricard
--
Ricard Wolf Wanderlöf                           ricardw(at)axis.com
Axis Communications AB, Lund, Sweden            www.axis.com
Phone +46 46 272 2016                           Fax +46 46 13 61 30