When preparing the ppc relocation patches I noticed that the gcc -mrelocatable compiler flag increases the .reloc section by 3 or 4 Kbytes. I did a compile test, and this increase pushes the ALPR board back over 256K (it recently had the same size issue, see "ppc4xx: Remove some features from ALPR to fit into 256k again"). No other boards appear to break size-wise.
So I guess I had 2 questions:
- Is enabling proper relocation worth the 3/4KB that will be added to
every ppc binary? I personally think so as the manual relocation fixups that currently litter the code can be removed and true relocation is much less hokey in the long run. X-ES's U-Boot binaries also are generally much smaller than their allocated 512KB, so this increase doesn't affect me much:)
You can get some of this space back by just #ifdef:ing out the manual relocation code. Removing it completely is OK by me though.
The size can be further decreased by looking over the use of global data: - Some tables can be replaced by code. - Combine several global variables into one struct variable. - reducing string literals
One day we can fit the whole relocation table into built-in CPU memory, hopefully that will make it possible to make u-boot a true PIC exe
Jocke