[v2,12/18] kbuild: add support for clang LTO

[Nicholas Piggin]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 12:21:52 -0800
Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen at google.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 01:21:39PM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > Do you have any kind of numbers for this, out of curiosity? Binary
> > size, performance, build time?  
> 
> I don't have performance numbers to share. Are there any specific
> benchmarks you'd be interested in seeing? Build time typically
> increases with LTO and in my experience, binary size tends to increase
> by ~10-15% as well.

By deduction, then you must see some performance improvement? :) 

I just wonder are you doing this because there is some worthwhile
performance gain? Or to enable more testing and development of LTO?
Any clues for why a user would want to enable it.

> 
> > Why is this needed? It would have been nice to get rid of the
> > !THIN_ARCHIVES option if you can make the patches work with the thin
> > archives paths.  
> 
> I believe LLVMgold doesn't know how to deal with an archive of LLVM IR
> files, but I can certainly use thin archives as an index and extract
> the path names for linking. I'll look into it.

Thanks, if you could. Possibly file a request with LLVMgold too, it
seems to be that toolchain support for archives is quite strong, so it
will be good to keep pushing for that.

Thanks,
Nick