Re: linux 2.1.117 built with egcs-1.1 19980823

["David S. Miller" <davem at dm dot cobaltmicro dot com>]

   Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 22:07:49 -0600
   From: Jeffrey A Law <law@hurl.cygnus.com>

   It would probably be to our advantage if you could select one of
   the datapoints from the bloat-o-meter chart and analyze it.  Even
   superficial like "more spills than before" would be worth knowing.

Finding this wouldn't surprise me as in other areas the Haifa
scheduler has been shown to extend register lifetimes unduly.

(Andi, as a fun experiment, rebuild the kernel with
 "-fno-schedule-insns -fschedule-insns2", this turns off
 the first scheduling pass, yet keeps the second pass enabled which
 runs after register allocation and therefore can't increase
 register pressure and create more spills)

I've found the Haifa issue to be a real big problem.  I suspect though
that some minor tuning after deeper analysis can fix most of the
issues.

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com