What's the downside to doing it in the linker?

Posted Aug 2, 2013 18:10 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: What's the downside to doing it in the linker? by paulj
Parent article: Transparent decompression for ext4

Why is it better to move this to the kernel, rather than the system linker?

I'd say it fits more cleanly in the kernel. That means fewer people would be surprised to find it there and when it needs to be altered or expanded in the future, it will be more feasible.

As a practical matter, I don't see anything about transparent decompression that is unique to program code; if this is good for files the linker accesses, it must be good for files other programs access too.

On the other hand, it also looks like the whole thing has very limited applicability because of its need to read and cache the entire file, as well as the special procedure for creating the files and the nature of the I/O time vs CPU time tradeoff, so even putting it in the system linker might be too general a solution to the Android Firefox problem.