On 2/9/2016 9:52 PM, Ken Moffat wrote:
After last month's discussions on lfs-dev about building with gold, I thought I would give it a go. I'll CC this to blfs-dev and blfs-support : if you reply, please consider which list is appropriate. For those who have not encountered it, gold is a different linker, developed by google and supposedly much faster. I was initially dubious - when I last saw comments about it (a long while ago) I recall that the linux kernel failed to link, perhaps only for some .config options, and I anticipated problems in BLFS. I built using LFS-svn from the 2nd of this month, and BLFS from the 4th - my normal desktop, plus all of TeX and most of kde5. This was with GNU gold (GNU Binutils 2.26.20160125) 1.11 - for LFS I had to add bison to the end of chapter five and pass --enable-gold --enable-plugins to chapter six binutils. I managed to get a vast amount of output on my screen while running the tests (instead of to my test log), but all that my log shows for the gold summary is: ================== All 3 tests passed ================== When I initially built gold on a completed system, I think there were about 225 other tests before or after that, so I need to fix my script (2>>&1 in the wrong place!). I did not attempt to use gold until chapter 6 had completed (so, my first package was the linux kernel) and I hacked up an ld symlink at /usr/bin/gold/ld to avoid major changes to my scripts (i.e. just alter the PATH in my main scripts - this also simplifies trying to test if a build failure is because of gold: just drop that part of the PATH). In practice, my problems were few. A list of the packages I built is at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~ken/gold-tests/packages-built-with-gold-Feb-2016 and of those only libglade [ patch now in patches ], firefox (! : it told me to use --disable-elf-hack https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246416) and gtkimageview-1.6.4 (for ufraw : fixed with a sed which is in my lsit). Please note that I did not attempt to compare build times with gold and regular old ld. This was just a test to estimate how many packages will need fixes, and the number looks manageable. I also have no idea whether gold can be used when building chapter five. ĸen
Holy cow, that's a lot of info, and a ton of work to just throw at a newer linker! I've put this on back burner until after 7.9, but your results are obviously very encouraging. Thanks for doing all that work and sharing! When I get a few free cycles, I'll give it a go with the ld->ld.gold in chapter 5 and 6.
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