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| <a name="Memory-Usage-1"></a> |
| <h3 class="section">2.4 Memory Usage</h3> |
| <p>BFD keeps all of its internal structures in obstacks. There is one obstack |
| per open BFD file, into which the current state is stored. When a BFD is |
| closed, the obstack is deleted, and so everything which has been |
| allocated by BFD for the closing file is thrown away. |
| </p> |
| <p>BFD does not free anything created by an application, but pointers into |
| <code>bfd</code> structures become invalid on a <code>bfd_close</code>; for example, |
| after a <code>bfd_close</code> the vector passed to |
| <code>bfd_canonicalize_symtab</code> is still around, since it has been |
| allocated by the application, but the data that it pointed to are |
| lost. |
| </p> |
| <p>The general rule is to not close a BFD until all operations dependent |
| upon data from the BFD have been completed, or all the data from within |
| the file has been copied. To help with the management of memory, there |
| is a function (<code>bfd_alloc_size</code>) which returns the number of bytes |
| in obstacks associated with the supplied BFD. This could be used to |
| select the greediest open BFD, close it to reclaim the memory, perform |
| some operation and reopen the BFD again, to get a fresh copy of the data |
| structures. |
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