kbuild: add an elfnote for whether vmlinux is built with lto

2021-04-24T20:25:42+00:00

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: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo Signed-off-by: Yonghong Song Reviewed-by: Nick Desaulniers Tested-by: Sedat Dilek # LLVM/Clang v12.0.0-rc4 (x86-64) Tested-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada

kernel/linux.git/include/linux/elfnote-lto.h, branch v6.6.132

kbuild: add an elfnote for whether vmlinux is built with lto