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WIESS 2000 Abstract
Incremental
Linking on HP-UX
Dmitry Mikulin, Murali Vijayasundaram, and Loreena Wong, Hewlett-Packard Co.
Abstract
The linker is often a time bottleneck in the
development of large applications. Traditional linkers process all
input files, even if only one or two objects have changed since the
previous link. To shorten link time, we have developed an incremental
linker for HP-UX which only processes modified files. Users can take
advantage of the performance gains without modifying their usage
patterns of the existing HP-UX linker since the incremental linker is
implemented on top of the regular 64-bit linker. In addition to the
tasks of the normal linker, the incremental linker must save extra
information about input files, symbols and relocations, allow for the
expansion of existing files and addition of new ones by allocating
padding spaces in the output file and use this information to perform
in-place updates. The results of several different design
considerations and tradeoffs are materialized in link-time
performance gains of up to thirteen times that of a normal link for
large applications.
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