GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?

[Joe Buck]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 06:41:59AM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 11:23:20AM +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
> > Joe Buck writes:
> >  > Richard Henderson showed that the libjava build spends 2/3 of its time
> >  > in libtool, and that his hand-hacked (but not portable) modification to
> >  > invoke the appropriate binutils commands directly gave a huge speedup.
> > 
> > Yes, but please bear in mind that this *only* happens when you have a
> > machine with huge RAM.  For other people with small RAM, the link
> > itself is an important factor.  Also, other people have found that the
> > libtool script consumes a smaller part of total execution time: rth's
> > measurements are at one extreme of the scale.
> 
> We have been working on linker speed. If you have a number to show
> that the GNU linker is very slow on certain things, I will take a
> look.

I'm glad you're looking at speeding up the linker.  Please make sure to
look at memory consumption as well, since performance falls off a cliff
once the working set exceeds physical memory.  A good test would be to
bootstrap gcc on a machine with 256M, or that is artificially limited to
256M (I seem to recall that you can tell a Linux kernel you have only a
given amount of memory).