A note on the binutils BOF

A note on the binutils BOF

[Tom Tromey]

Hi.  I wasn't able to attend the GNU tools conference this year, but I
have been listening to various parts as time permits.  This morning I
listened to the binutils BOF and I thought I'd comment a bit.

At the BOF, Nick asked if anyone uses gold as their normal linker.  I
do!  On my personal laptop, it is approximately 2x faster when linking
gdb.  This kind of timing is representative for my setup:

BFD	0m13.188s
gold	0m6.635s

I've saved tons of time over the years by making this switch.  IIRC the
difference was even more pronounced when I was working on Firefox.

Yes, I know about lld; I was disappointed to hear that this is somehow
considered the future, though.  For me the GNU vision and the GPL still
matter.

So, I'd like to encourage binutils developers to continue working on
gold.  I wish it was the default GNU linker.


Second, Nick asked if anyone had issues to bring up.

One question I've had for years is whether binutils maintainers would
agree to removing "chew".  It frustrates me whenever I work on BFD,
mainly because it puts important code in comments, where things like
"tags" won't find it.  Ostensibly it is used for attaching
documentation, but in practice... I never use those docs.  I wonder if
anybody does?  Would people agree to removing chew in favor of writing C
code in the ordinary way?

thanks,
Tom

Re: A note on the binutils BOF

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 01:54:19PM -0600, Tom Tromey wrote:
> At the BOF, Nick asked if anyone uses gold as their normal linker.  I
> do!  On my personal laptop, it is approximately 2x faster when linking
> gdb.  This kind of timing is representative for my setup:
> 
> BFD	0m13.188s
> gold	0m6.635s
> 
> I've saved tons of time over the years by making this switch.  IIRC the
> difference was even more pronounced when I was working on Firefox.

As another random datapoint, on Fedora and RHEL like systems (and
probably others) you can use update-alternatives --set ld
/usr/bin/ld.gold to make gold the stadard linker. It works just fine
for my personal hacking and only noticed recently because I was
looking into the interaction between gcc/as/ld. If there are
bugs/issues in gold they seem to be hidden pretty well :)

Cheers,

Mark

Re: A note on the binutils BOF

[Martin Liška]

On 8/26/20 11:57 PM, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 01:54:19PM -0600, Tom Tromey wrote:
>> At the BOF, Nick asked if anyone uses gold as their normal linker.  I
>> do!  On my personal laptop, it is approximately 2x faster when linking
>> gdb.  This kind of timing is representative for my setup:
>>
>> BFD	0m13.188s
>> gold	0m6.635s
>>
>> I've saved tons of time over the years by making this switch.  IIRC the
>> difference was even more pronounced when I was working on Firefox.
> 
> As another random datapoint, on Fedora and RHEL like systems (and
> probably others) you can use update-alternatives --set ld
> /usr/bin/ld.gold to make gold the stadard linker.

Just a note, SUSE does the very same.

> It works just fine
> for my personal hacking and only noticed recently because I was
> looking into the interaction between gcc/as/ld. If there are
> bugs/issues in gold they seem to be hidden pretty well :)

I would like to point out that big project like Firefox, Chromium and
probably others do use ld.gold in their build system. And we build the
packages with ld.gold.

I noticed recently that ld.gold has threading capacity which is a nice
feature for large binaries. However, it does not interact well with LTO:
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26200

Martin

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Mark
>