[Xastir-Dev] Makefile optimizations for low memory machines

Curt Mills, WE7U hacker at tc.fluke.com
Wed Nov 5 16:19:54 EST 2003


On Sat, 25 Oct 2003, David Flood wrote:

> I'm in the process of bashing together a tracker / display that might be (if
> I can get it working) used for the upcoming Seattle Marathon.
>
> Since the laptop will be at risk of possible damage by the folks viewing the
> map, I'm using an old P90 with 32M or so of RAM and compiling Xastir under
> Cygwin.  This is due to the fact that I can get Windows 98 to admit the card
> can do graphics, I can't get Xwindows to admit it exists.
>
> And the low memory is the rub.  The 'make all' process gets as far as the
> very last call to GCC and it just sits there thrashing in ld (about 8 hours
> so far on this attempt).
>
> Is there any way to break that last call to GCC into smaller chunks to link
> together and then those pre-linked (or whatever you want to call it) files
> can be finally linked together?

Just tried a "low-memory" machine with Cygwin.  In this case, low
memory means 128MB running Win2k.  Win2k likes to use 109MB or so
doing nothing (with virus scanning running).

I had to become admin, increase the max size of the swap area for
each drive, log back in as a normal user, then Windows popped up a
message saying it was low on virtual memory and increasing it for
me.

Before I did that, the link stage just seemed to repeat over and
over, as evidenced by "ld" in Task Manager going from around 10MB to
about 100MB, then repeating.  It would never finish.

Try cranking up your virtual memory settings to see if "ld" can
complete the final link stage.

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math!"
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates!" -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"



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