Re: Thumb2 code size improvements

On Fri, Sep 03, 2010, Yao Qi wrote:

We are looking for some possible improvements and optimizations on thumb2 code size. Currently, I am running some benchmarks with compilation flag "-Os -march=armv7-a -mthumb", and hope to find some thing interesting that we can improve. Beside that, do you have some ideas on this topic? or do you have some observations on thumb2 code that we may probably improve the size?

One of the largest self-contained piece of code which we'll find on all systems which Linaro targets is ... the kernel. It's not always trivial to build it in Thumb mode, but it would seem like a good test case nevertheless. At least if it builds, looking at the resulting size would be a good test, even if it doesn't boot :-)