Using madvise for ld.so

[Luciano Montanaro]

On Tuesday 16 March 2004 12:52, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 of March 2004 12:34, Michael Matz wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > following up Lubos' hack in kdeinit and friends to use madvise to speed up
> > loading DSOs and his observation that this better belongs inside ld.so I
> > did so (thanks to Lubos for fixing a silly error in it).
> >
> > The patch is for glibc CVS.  With older glibc's the GLRO has to be
> > replaced with GL, and the order of the fields in rtld.c has changed a bit.
> > I'm sure you'll figure out.  Brings a bit of speed up, ask Lubos for
> > details ;)
> 
>  I've build a RPM for SUSE 9.0, with the attached patch. The RPM is at 
> http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/download/glibc-2.3.2-0.i586.rpm . The wrong 
> revision number clearly shows that I'm a lame packager and this is at your 
> own risk, and if it blows up your computer and fries your cat, it's your 
> fault :). But I use this rpm right now, in fact. The source rpm was 2.3.2-92, 
> as available in the FTP version.
> 
>  Could somebody give it a try and post some results? Michael says that he 
> didn't get that high speedup as I did. Refer to the 'preloading of binaries' 
> thread for details.
> 

With standard glibc t takes ~15 seconds from kdm screen to the removal of the 
splash screen. With the patched glibc it goes down to ~8.
How does the patch affect memory-challenged machines, though?

Luciano