25% PowerPC code size increase since last September?

[Peter Dufault]

> On Jun 28, 2015, at 11:05 , Peter Dufault <dufault at hda.com> wrote:
> 
> In updating the Phytec MPC5554 to this mornings build I see a large code size increase.  It will no longer fit in the 2MB FLASH on the MPC5554, which is a problem.  Here are the sizes of the binaries, the first one built two days ago against the RTEMS in September and the second one using the identical user code base and this morning’s RTEMS.  I haven’t done much to analyze this yet other than to verify it’s still being built with the same optimization flags.
> 
> -rwxrwxr-x 1 pjd usergrp 1624684 Jun 26 09:42 fw.bin.gcc4.8.2
> -rwxrwxr-x 1 pjd usergrp 2017220 Jun 28 10:48 fw.bin
> 
> Has anyone else noticed this?  Does anyone regularly monitor the size of the test suite binaries to watch for changes?  Are there new options that should be set to disable new features that add size overhead?
> 
> I’ll start looking through the maps to see if it is new code or the compiler, the compiler has gone from 4.8.2 to 4.9.2.
> 

I think it’s mostly new C++ overhead, some interpreter type code (I mean similar to scanf, etc, with a fixed overhead for supporting all strings) is now pulling in all kinds of money conversions, etc, that weren’t there before.

I calculated the increase in size due to symbols containing “std::” has gone up by 236,295 bytes without any changes to the user code. That’s a big chunk of the 392,536 bytes show above.

There are also a bunch of new shell commands that are pulling in new code, that might be a lot of the rest.

Peter
-----------------
Peter Dufault
HD Associates, Inc.      Software and System Engineering