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Commit 1fdd7433 authored by Yonghong Song's avatar Yonghong Song Committed by Masahiro Yamada
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kbuild: add an elfnote for whether vmlinux is built with lto



Currently, clang LTO built vmlinux won't work with pahole.
LTO introduced cross-cu dwarf tag references and broke
current pahole model which handles one cu as a time.
The solution is to merge all cu's as one pahole cu as in [1].
We would like to do this merging only if cross-cu dwarf
references happens. The LTO build mode is a pretty good
indication for that.

In earlier version of this patch ([2]), clang flag
-grecord-gcc-switches is proposed to add to compilation flags
so pahole could detect "-flto" and then merging cu's.
This will increate the binary size of 1% without LTO though.

Arnaldo suggested to use a note to indicate the vmlinux
is built with LTO. Such a cheap way to get whether the vmlinux
is built with LTO or not helps pahole but is also useful
for tracing as LTO may inline/delete/demote global functions,
promote static functions, etc.

So this patch added an elfnote with a new type LINUX_ELFNOTE_LTO_INFO.
The owner of the note is "Linux".

With gcc 8.4.1 and clang trunk, without LTO, I got
  $ readelf -n vmlinux
  Displaying notes found in: .notes
    Owner                Data size        Description
  ...
    Linux                0x00000004       func
     description data: 00 00 00 00
  ...
With "readelf -x ".notes" vmlinux", I can verify the above "func"
with type code 0x101.

With clang thin-LTO, I got the same as above except the following:
     description data: 01 00 00 00
which indicates the vmlinux is built with LTO.

  [1] https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20210325065316.3121287-1-yhs@fb.com/
  [2] https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20210331001623.2778934-1-yhs@fb.com/

Suggested-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <arnaldo.melo@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarYonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarNick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Tested-by: Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@gmail.com> # LLVM/Clang v12.0.0-rc4 (x86-64)
Tested-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMasahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
parent 6e74bc4c
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