[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] cabac: initialize all of ff_h264_cabac_tables programmatically.

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 30.08.2014, at 19:46, Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 30.08.2014, at 19:01, wm4 <nfxjfg at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> but still I wonder why you'd optimize
>> for binary size, in exchange for higher RAM usage. What is your
>> motivation for doing this?
> 
> The only higher RAM usage would be when you actually use H.264, and it would be from the two additional lines of code.
> When you are not using H.264 the RAM usage (with some caveats on what the linker does) will be several 100 bytes lower.

Small amendment: I missed that Linux seems to use copy-on-write for the data section.
This means that the first 512 bytes of the table could in theory end up being shared. You'd have to be lucky enough that they just end up on a different page than the rest of the array. At the same time, the extra RAM usage when H.264 is not used would be once per system, not per process.
I still wouldn't count it as using "more RAM", especially considering not all OSes handle this as nicely as Linux, but it makes it a bit more borderline.