[PATCH] shared libbusybox, option for IMA mode

[Bernhard Fischer]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 05:32:32PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:

>Well, my theory going forward is that we should try to _stay_ stable, and have 
>a new release every 3 months or so.  (This doesn't mean we can't check in big 
>things, just that we should test 'em and clean them up and get them _out_ in 
>usable form.)  Most major changes happen on a per-applet basis, so worst case 
>scenario is we have to temporarily revert an applet for a release.  Fluffing 
>up the regression testing suite is highly cool, too.

I will thus checkin the attached patch during the weekend unless
somebody objects loudly (minimal eta about 30 hours from now).

The uncompressed patch was a bit too large to be accepted by the
mailer on busybox.net, so i did put it here:
http://busybox.net/~aldot/busybox.cow-20060113-1003.diff

It does allow for building libbb as shared object libbusybox.so in
combinations of:
- full libbb/*
- partial libbb/* (¹)
- link busybox against libbusybox or not.

Also it adds an option which allows to compile busybox in IMA mode
(other compiler vendors do call this IPA, IPO etc) which results in
smaller binary-code as more optimizations can be perused. As noted in
the help text, this option does not help produce smaller code in all
cases (i.e. for all compilers) and is therefor considered experimental.
See "Build Options"->"Compile all sources at once" and refer to the
respective documentation shipped with your compiler of choice.


(¹) the applets need to be audited to add the functions they call from
libbusybox. e.g. in libbb/Makefile.in:
LIBBB-$(CONFIG_FEATURE_WHATEVER)+= some.c


>Basically, letting new features sit in svn for eight months doesn't really 
>seem to provide all that much benefit.  That may work for wine, but not so 
>much for code.

:)
>

PS: I'd like to hear from ARM people if the
+OPTIMIZATION+=$(call check_gcc,-msingle-pic-base,)
is something they want to have or not. TIA.

>> thanks,
>> Bernhard
>
>Rob
>-- 
>Steve Ballmer: Innovation!  Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word.
>I do not think it means what you think it means.
>