Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!ast
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Packed versus unpacked assembly: How do you tell?
Message-ID: <2116@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 2 Mar 89 15:18:31 GMT
References: <2046@marconi.sw.mcc.com>
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 17

In article <2046@marconi.sw.mcc.com> knutson@marconi.sw.mcc.com (Jim Knutson) writes:
>I have become a little uncomfortable with the packed and unpacked
>assembly files looking the same (externally).  My latest bout with
>this ended up with my building a libc.a with an unpacked setjmp.s.

There is nothing wrong with mixing them.  Asld will accept both.
All packing does is it replaces about 120 predefined strings with the
ASCII codes above 128.  This reduces library size and speeds up linking.
If you want a list of which strings are replaced, look at the source of
libupack.c.  The table there gives them in numerical order.  These were
chosen by compiling a vast amount of C with the MINIX compiler, then
running the collected assembly code through sort| uniq -c to see which
ones occurred most.

Someday there ought to be a proper assembler and linker.  Someday ...

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)