Linus Torvalds wrote:

First off, gcc _does_ have a perfectly fine notion of how heavy-weight an 
"asm" statement is: just count it as a single instruction (and count the 
argument setup cost that gcc _can_ estimate).

True.  It's not what it's doing, though.  It looks for '\n' and ';'
characters, and counts the maximum instruction size for each possible
instruction.

The reason why is that gcc's size estimation is partially designed to
select what kind of branches it needs to use on architectures which have
more than one type of branches.  As a result, it tends to drastically
overestimate, on purpose.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.