Re: draft mcount(3) man page

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 05:29:30PM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
 > This looks awesome, David, thanks for writing it!

 :-)

 > Might it be worth noting some of the historical legacy symbol
 > naming issues that were are the root of the bug report we were just
 > talking about a little while ago?

After investigation I don't think that's actually true: the name in
MCOUNT_DECL is a C name, so in a.out days if given as "mcount" would
have come out as "_mcount" and still be in the user namespace. The
name of the assembly function is not necessarily, but that's _mcount
on alpha. Now, anyway; was probably different originally as having the
same obviously would never have worked.

(context for passersby: PR 10582)


To cut down on future confusion we should probably (if it's not
excessively expensive for some reason) change all the compiler configs
to call "__mcount_hook" and change the name of the C function to
always be "__mcount_impl" or "__mcount_backend" or something like
that. Having both _mcount and __mcount is terrible, especially when
their roles are exchanged on ~half the ports we have.

(Since profiling binaries are static and these functions aren't
user-facing there's no compatibility issues with changing them.)

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost