Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 17:23:18 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: "Mark E." cc: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: .align directives in libc.a In-Reply-To: <199907211310.NAA41654@out5.ibm.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Mark E. wrote: > > Then I suggest to aim at having the next release of Binutils use > > 16-byte section alignment for DJGPP. Do you agree? > > If changing the alignment will help programs run faster, then I'm all for > it. We had a thread here some time ago about this, and a conclusion was that boosting to 16-byte alignment removed random slow-down of programs compiled with different versions of GCC and Binutils, when run on Pentium. This issue is an annoying source of FAQs since Binutils 2.6 (see section 14.3 in the FAQ). v2.02 solved part of this by aligning the stack on 8-byte boundary. It would be nice if we could finally close this issue for good, at least until Intel come out with a chip that fetches on 32-byte boundary ;-) Also, if somebody wants to squeeze the most out of an inner loop, they would carefully align the jump targets and entry points to 16-byte boundary, as Intel suggests. However, if the subsections aren't 16-byte aligned, they will never be able to get what they want, not with COFF.