Work done for Incremental link so far ?

Work done for Incremental link so far ?

[Yinon Ehrlich]

Hi,


I want to contribute to ld's incremental link feature.

I looked in the mailing list' archives and saw that a lot of work was already done, but 
cannot find out what exactly.

Could you please provide me with pointers for starting - what was already implemented, what 
are the next TODOs, is there any IRC channel to discuss this work and so on...


Thanks in advance,

     Yinon

Re: Work done for Incremental link so far ?

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Yinon Ehrlich <yinon.me@gmail.com> writes:

> I want to contribute to ld's incremental link feature.
>
> I looked in the mailing list' archives and saw that a lot of work was
> already done, but cannot find out what exactly.
>
> Could you please provide me with pointers for starting - what was
> already implemented, what are the next TODOs, is there any IRC channel
> to discuss this work and so on...

There is work being done to support incremental linking in the gold
linker.  Cary Coutant, CC'ed, is doing this work.  I think it's mostly a
set of patches in his own working directory, though.  There is some
design discussion at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GoldIncrementalLinking .  I
don't know how up to date that is.

I'm not aware of any work on incremental linking in the GNU linker.

Ian

Re: Work done for Incremental link so far ?

[Cary Coutant]

>> Could you please provide me with pointers for starting - what was
>> already implemented, what are the next TODOs, is there any IRC channel
>> to discuss this work and so on...
>
> There is work being done to support incremental linking in the gold
> linker.  Cary Coutant, CC'ed, is doing this work.  I think it's mostly a
> set of patches in his own working directory, though.  There is some
> design discussion at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GoldIncrementalLinking .  I
> don't know how up to date that is.

Yeah, I haven't been sending the patches very regularly, sorry. I'm in
bug-fixing mode right now, and will start feeding patches upstream
shortly, as soon as I get around to doing a git rebase -i to put them
into some semblance of a reasonable order. I did post a set of patches
back in September -- Ian reviewed the first of those and I committed
it, but I'll resubmit the other four.

I need to update the wiki page to reflect the current implementation
-- I've had to add a field to track the section index for global
symbols in relocatable objects, a flag for whether a symbol is defined
or referenced in shared objects, an is_in_system_directory flag for
each input file, and a count of local symbols for each input file.

-cary

Re: Work done for Incremental link so far ?

[Yinon Ehrlich]

On 02/14/2011 09:03 PM, Cary Coutant wrote:

>>> Could you please provide me with pointers for starting - what was
>>> already implemented, what are the next TODOs, is there any IRC channel
>>> to discuss this work and so on...
>> There is work being done to support incremental linking in the gold
>> linker.  Cary Coutant, CC'ed, is doing this work.  I think it's mostly a
>> set of patches in his own working directory, though.  There is some
>> design discussion at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GoldIncrementalLinking .  I
>> don't know how up to date that is.
> Yeah, I haven't been sending the patches very regularly, sorry. I'm in
> bug-fixing mode right now, and will start feeding patches upstream
> shortly, as soon as I get around to doing a git rebase -i to put them
> into some semblance of a reasonable order. I did post a set of patches
> back in September -- Ian reviewed the first of those and I committed
> it, but I'll resubmit the other four.
>
> I need to update the wiki page to reflect the current implementation
> -- I've had to add a field to track the section index for global
> symbols in relocatable objects, a flag for whether a symbol is defined
> or referenced in shared objects, an is_in_system_directory flag for
> each input file, and a count of local symbols for each input file.
>
> -cary
Hi Cary & Ian,
thanks for the great work. I already changed all software links in our company to be done by 
gold and saw an amazing speed-up in link time (approx. 70%). However the faster linking 
goes, the stronger the appetite for more speed becomes  ;)
I'm reading the gold sources and http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GoldIncrementalLinking and have the 
following questions:
* Are there specific areas where I can contribute to incremental linking ?
* I have added a link to http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/LinkGlossary - is this the right place to 
put terms I learned and/or want to share/ask ?

Thanks a lot,
     Yinon