Subject: Re: [PATCH] Makefile: set USE_PIC on Linux x86_64 for linking with Git.pm

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 14:24:37 -0700

Marco Roeland <[email-masked]> writes:

> Even for Linux someone mentioned that probably i386 is the exception in
> _not_ needing the -fPIC linkage. It might even be specific to the Perl
> "xs" implementation specifics?

USE_PIC is for pleasing Perly git and nothing else right now.

> So I should have added "Works for me (TM)"! ;-)

That would have been more explicit way to tell me that this is a
partial solution and I should solicit help from people on other
platforms.

By the way, I had an impression that compiling things with -fPIC
when not necessary was generally a bad idea from performance
point of view.  If that is the case we might want to compile,
under USE_PIC, everything with -fPIC in a separate area to
compile and link with Git.xs, without affecting the C-only core
code.

I suspect this would largely depend on the architecture.  I ran
git-fsck-objects compiled with and without -fPIC (after "make
clean" to rebuild everything) on a fully packed copy of the
linux-2.6 repository on my x86_64 box, and did not see
meaningful differences:

: gitster; /usr/bin/time ../git.junio/git-fsck-objects-no-pic --full
109.71user 5.01system 1:54.89elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (14major+1834967minor)pagefaults 0swaps
: gitster; /usr/bin/time ../git.junio/git-fsck-objects-with-pic --full
109.05user 4.97system 1:54.08elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+1834981minor)pagefaults 0swaps
: gitster;