Opportunity for speedup

[pgf at laptop.org]

mitch wrote:
 > Bobby Powers wrote:
 > > - its designed to be as light as possible, using syscalls instead of
 > > libc functions as much as possible (the only thing we use libc for is
 > > string comparison, which could be replaced with a local function).
 > > while its written like this, I haven't worked on cutting down the
 > > linking (I need some guidance for that)

great stuff bobby -- i'm happy to help with any remaining details if
you like.

 > >   
 > 
 > To reduce the execution footprint, you could try linking it against 
 > dietlibc, http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/
 > 
 > I'm not sure just how much time that would save; maybe it wouldn't be 
 > significant.  But it's worth a try.

my gut says that using already present glibc shared lib will be cheaper
than introducing a new library, even if it's small and static.  but
you're right it's worth a try.

 > > and source is avail at
 > > http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/bobbyp/bootanim

i took a very brief look.  as a favor to future maintainers,
i think you could either a) merge boot-anim-start/client/stop and
ul-warning into a single executable (much of the code is the
same) or b) extract the common parts (e.g. initial_setup(), and the
code that mmaps the framebuffer) into a boot-anim-utils.c or
something like that.

(and while i'm all for reducing dependencies, the XO has so much
else going on that i don't think using against string libraries
or even stdio will affect things much in the greater scheme of
things.  so i'd have used fputs rather than write(2,...) for
errors.  but i understand the intent.)

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org