On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 23:57 +0200, Jose E. Marchesi wrote:
> This avoids relocation overflows in sparc/sparc64 targets
while
> linking, where the reachable data using -fpic is only 4kb.
I think this is OK. -fpic/-fPIC only changes things on m68k, PowerPC
and SPARC. So the only other arch we currently support that this
might impact is powerpc. Is there any disadvantage on that platform
of using -fPIC instead of -fpic?
I am not sure of the details in powerpc, but in RISC architectures with
fixed-width 32-bit instructions using -fPIC usually translates into
larger text sections, as it requires using more instructions to handle
the GOT table offsets when compared with -fpic.
For example, in SPARC -fPIC uses three instructions for each GOT
reference, while -fpic uses just one instruction.
OK, so this only is an actual change for some 32bit architectures?
In that case I think it is fine to use -fPIC everywhere. Then only
sparc32 and ppc32 will see an actual change in code generated. Unless
someone sees a problem with that.
Thanks,
Mark