- o - change the memory usage to reflect the message which follows the
- page break.
- o - implement bfd_abort, which should close the bfd but not alter the
- filesystem.
- o - update the bfd doc; write a how-to-write-a-backend doc.
- o - change reloc handling as per Steve's suggestion.
- (more details please.....)
-\f
-Changing the way bfd uses memory. The new convention is simple:
-
- o - bfd will never write into user-supplied memory, nor attempt to
- free it.
- o - closing a bfd may reclaim all bfd-allocated memory associated
- with that bfd.
- - - bfd_target_list will be the one exception; you must reclaim the
- returned vector yourself.
+ o - A source of space lossage is that all the target-dependent code
+ is in a single bfd_target structure. Hence all the code for
+ *writing* object files is still pulled into all the applications
+ that only care about *reading* (gdb, nm, objdump), while gas has
+ to carry along all the unneeded baggage for reading objects. And
+ so on. This would be a substantial change, and the payoff would
+ not all that great (essentially none if bfd is used as a shared
+ library).