David Daney wrote:
Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
Perhaps the question is a bit silly, but I thought I'd ask it anyway.
I'm compiling some software for a Linux/uClibc on a mipsel platform.
Right now I'm using gcc 3.4.4 to do both native and cross-compilation.
A while ago gcc 4.1 was released, and boasts many optimizations.
As the mipsel devices I use are rather slow - here comes the point of
my question: will binaries I compile with gcc 4.1 be faster than these
compiled with 3.4.4?
I don't really care about compilation time; I'm only concerned with
the speed of the binaries made with gcc 3.4.4 and 4.1 (i.e., will gzip
compiled with gcc 4.1 compress a given file faster than gzip
compressed with gcc 3.4.4).
Both gcc-3.4.4 and 4.1 are available to you, so in theory you could
answer this question empirically (assuming that you also have the gzip
sources and a file you could test the resulting gzip executable on).
Well, now I have only gcc-3.4.4 available for mipsel/uClibc; I don't
have gcc-4.1 as a cross-compiler nor a native compiler.
As creating a cross-compiler is not an easy process, I'd have to compile
a native 4.1 gcc.
And compiling gcc-4.1 on this mipsel device could take a week or so I
guess (provided everything goes well after I type "make <enter>", which
is not always the case).
Hence my question.
You don't say what version of Binutils you are using. But with recent
snapshots of Binutils you can use '-Wa,-mno-shared, -ffunction-sections
-fdata-sections -Wl,--gc-sections' to good effect on mips[el]-linux.
I'm using binutils 2.16.1.
Does it still apply here?
--
Tomasz Chmielewski
WPKG - http://wpkg.org
Software deployment with Samba
