toplev.c and HZ (was: gcc-2.8.0 released)

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < 9801261527.AA07471@kona. >you write:
  > I would hope the optimizer would optimize away redundant
  > initialization to zero, right?  Clearly it should.
No it shouldn't.

There are sometimes reasons to do stuff like

static int debugflags = 0x0

Then later use adb, gdb, emacs, whatever to edit the binary to change
the debug flags in the binary itself.

If gcc optimized debugflags into bss then this kind of action would
not be possible.

jeff