Messages in this thread |  | | Subject | Re: Prerelease of 2.1.0 | From | Tom May <> | Date | 24 Sep 1996 12:23:46 -0700 |
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Uwe Bonnes <bon@elektron.ikp.physik.th-darmstadt.de> writes:
> But dosen't that free up an register for user usage. With ELF, we lost this > register (giving a lot of programming freedom), could we get it back now?
No, because:
1. This is a kernel, not a user, change.
2. We have freed a segment register, not a general purpose register.
3. ELF uses an additional dedicated register only in position independent (i.e., shared library) code, and only in functions that access global variables. And *that* is just a suboptimal implementation of position independent code which could be fixed.
Note that using ELF does *not* make the kernel code less optimal than the a.out format because it is not position independent.
Tom.
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