[coreboot] an example of bad magic.

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Tue May 6 22:58:06 CEST 2008


just as a cautionary tale for the goal of moving everything to the
dts: I am working with some basic infiniband tools. As part of their
goal of making it all portable and easy to build, they use the libtool
support tools. So, for a simple command line like this:

/bin/sh ./libtool --mode=link --tag=CC gcc  -g -O2   -o src/vendstat
src_vendstat-vendstat.o src_vendstat-ibdiag_common.o  -lopensm
-losmvendor -losmcomp -libmad -libmad -libumad -libcommon
gcc -g -O2 -o src/vendstat src_vendstat-vendstat.o
src_vendstat-ibdiag_common.o  -lopensm -losmvendor -losmcomp -libmad
-libumad -libcommon

They need the libtool script, which is
 wc libtool
  7363  26779 212348 libtool

7363 lines. Geez, how long is the program?

The program is part of a set of diagnostic tools, and the bulk of them
are about 200 lines long. So, for a 200-line, 5330 character program,
we have a 332 character command line and, if that were not enough, a
7363-line, near quarter million character script.

This is a good example of the conservation of complexity. It is always
possible, in the name of hiding details, to create a monstrously
complex system that no one can understand.

Just FYI.

ron




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