[PATCH v2 02/13] Makefile: Allow LTO to be disabled for a build

[Tom Rini]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2022 at 10:58:44AM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Tom,
> 
> On Mon, 7 Mar 2022 at 07:33, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 08:42:57AM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> >
> > > LTO (Link-Time Optimisation) is an very useful feature which can
> > > significantly reduce the size of U-Boot binaries. So far it has been
> > > made available for selected ARM boards and sandbox.
> > >
> > > However, incremental builds are much slower when LTO is used. For example,
> > > an incremental build of sandbox takes 2.1 seconds on my machine, but 6.7
> > > seconds with LTO enabled.
> > >
> > > Add a LTO_BUILD=n parameter to the build, so it can be disabled during
> > > development if needed, for faster builds.
> > >
> > > Add some documentation about LTO while we are here.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
> >
> > We don't need this since you can do:
> > make EXTRA_CFLAGS="-fno-lto" EXTRA_LDFLAGS="-fno-lto"
> > to pass -fno-lto to compile/linking and disable lto and per
> > https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=46905 this has been working
> > for some time.
> 
> Thanks for that, it is a big pain point for me, picking up this patch
> for every series I write. The incremental build time for sandbox goes
> from 3 seconds to 27 seconds on my laptop with LTO, which is
> intolerable.

Yeah, I noticed it's visible on my laptop, but not at all on my desktop
(i7 vs Ryzen 7).

> The EXTRA_CFLAGS says it is for 'Backward compatibility' and it still
> does the various LTO things (i.e. it changes the build logic). It

We're unlikely to move to newer Linux kernel kbuild logic so this isn't
going away, and there's not much in the way of logic that's changed for
LTO that I see.

> seems odd to me to enable the option and then disable it later in the
> command line. It is therefore not quite equivalent. But it seems to
> work well enough for me fom a small amount of testing. If you are
> really set on not having a special option for it, I can live with it
> for now. I'm also not convinced that my patch entirely removes the LTO
> stuff in a consistent way.

Yeah, I really don't want to go down the path of overriding CONFIG
options via make/environment logic.  I'm also open to turning off LTO on
sandbox and on with qemu-* so it gets wider CI testing.

-- 
Tom
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 659 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/attachments/20220314/fcaf3f07/attachment.sig>