The first dynamic qstr pool is double the size of the 'alloc' field of
the last const qstr pool. The built in const qstr pool
(mp_qstr_const_pool) has a hardcoded alloc size of 10, meaning that the
first dynamic pool is allocated space for 20 entries. The alloc size
must be less than or equal to the actual number of qstrs in the pool
(the 'len' field) to ensure that the first dynamically created qstr
triggers the creation of a new pool.
When modules are frozen a second const pool is created (generally
mp_qstr_frozen_const_pool) and linked to the built in pool. However,
this second const pool had its 'alloc' field set to the number of qstrs
in the pool. When freezing a large quantity of modules this can result
in thousands of qstrs being in the pool. This means that the first
dynamically created qstr results in a massive allocation. This commit
sets the alloc size of the frozen qstr pool to 10 or less (if the number
of qstrs in the pool is less than 10). The result of this is that the
allocation behaviour when a dynamic qstr is created is identical with an
without frozen code.
Note that there is the potential for a slight memory inefficiency if the
frozen modules have less than 10 qstrs, as the first few dynamic
allocations will have quite a large overhead, but the geometric growth
soon deals with this.
This patch allows the following code to run without allocating on the heap:
super().foo(...)
Before this patch such a call would allocate a super object on the heap and
then load the foo method and call it right away. The super object is only
needed to perform the lookup of the method and not needed after that. This
patch makes an optimisation to allocate the super object on the C stack and
discard it right after use.
Changes in code size due to this patch are:
bare-arm: +128
minimal: +232
unix x64: +416
unix nanbox: +364
stmhal: +184
esp8266: +340
cc3200: +128
With caching of map lookups in the bytecode, frozen bytecode can still
work but must be stored in RAM, not ROM. This patch allows mpy-tool.py to
generate code that works with this optimisation, but it's not recommended
to use it on embedded targets (because of lack of RAM).
When an mpy file is frozen it must know the values of certain
configuration variables. This patch provides an explicit check in the
generated C file that the configuration variables are what they are
supposed to be.