Re: enabling link time optimizations in package builds
Hi Matthias, * Matthias Klose [2022-06-17 10:18]: The proposal is to turn on LTO by default on most 64bit release architectures. Not proposing to do this on 32bit architectures because of the limited address space at link time, and up to now nobody tested LTO on 32bit archs. In test rebuilds, there were 373 packages (dd-list in the wiki page) found not to build with link time optimizations for various reasons. These range from easily fixable issues in symbols files to some upstream issues. The idea is to fix as many of these as possible, and then change the packaging for the others to just turn off LTO in the package build. In one of my packages, turning on LTO did not fail the build, but exposed a dormant static initialization bug, as LTO apparently messes with the initialization order [1]. I'd expect more bugs of this kind to come up once LTO is enabled by default. Cheers Timo [1] https://github.com/isl-org/Open3D/issues/4747 -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ╭╮ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ │ Timo Röhling │ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ │ 9B03 EBB9 8300 DF97 C2B1 23BF CC8C 6BDD 1403 F4CA │ ⠈⠳⣄ ╰╯ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
enabling link time optimizations in package builds
Link time optimizations are an optimization that helps with a single digit percent number optimizing both for smaller size, and better speed. These optimizations are available for some time now in GCC. Link time optimizations are also at least turned on in other distros like Fedora, OpenSuse (two years) and Ubuntu (one year). Details at https://wiki.debian.org/ToolChain/LTO The proposal is to turn on LTO by default on most 64bit release architectures. Not proposing to do this on 32bit architectures because of the limited address space at link time, and up to now nobody tested LTO on 32bit archs. In test rebuilds, there were 373 packages (dd-list in the wiki page) found not to build with link time optimizations for various reasons. These range from easily fixable issues in symbols files to some upstream issues. The idea is to fix as many of these as possible, and then change the packaging for the others to just turn off LTO in the package build. To explicitly turn on LTO for a package build: export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS=optimize=+lto to explicitly disable LTO: export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS=optimize=-lto The idea is to file wishlist bug reports for those 373 packages and then see how far we get, and if it's feasible to already turn on LTO for bookworm. If not, it should be turned on by default for the following release. Matthias
