Re: KDE 2.0 impressions

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

> > Solaris also have a feature which allows the code in shared libraries to be 
> > reordered at link time so that frequently accessed code is clustered together 
> > and code which is very infrequently used is at the end of the file and is never 
> 
> Nat Friedman (he from Helix code) worked on a tool called grope to do this. I
> dont know what state it is in - Nat ?

There are a number of parts to the Cord/Grope work:

	1. Finding an algorithm that chooses the best ordering given a
           "run sample".

	2. Linking files using the description of the above sample.

	3. Instrumenting an existing binary to include profiling
           information even if the sources to the application are not
           available.

	4. Reordering an existing binary to follow the new map order.

Currently, you can generate the data for (1) by using the standard GNU
profiler, but you need to recompile your code with -pg and then relink
manually (2) and figure out the way to pass this information to the
linker.

Nat's work was focused on (1) and he did implement (4) and pieces of
(3), but they required binutils changes to add a few new items of
metadata required.  Last I head Nat dumped all his patches on Richard
Henderson, or was trying to dump them to him. 

Currently there is no set of tools that would match IRIX's pixie/cord
tools which is what we would ideally want to see.

Miguel.