[PATCH 0/4] Micro-optimize DWARF partial symbol reading

Tom Tromey
2020-05-20T17:40:34Z

A personal goal of mine is to improve the startup time of gdb. In the
long run, I think the answer lies partly with threading, and perhaps
with a more radical rewrite of the DWARF psymbol reader. However,
those are difficult goals; and in the short term, I found that just
profiling the reader and making small improvements can make a
difference.

This series improves the performance of the DWARF partial symbol
reader about 10% (more in one case) on some real-world executables.
See the first patch for details (I chose to put the details there so
they would end up in the eventual git log).

Regression tested on x86-64 Fedora 30.

Let me know what you think.

Tom