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

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Mon, 14 Mar 2022 at 06:49, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Yes you did mention that, but the problem is that LTO is very handy
with sandbox, to test the strange things that happen. For example, I
found the bug where LTO was dropping a linker-list item, using
sandbox. We could perhaps make one of the sandbox builds not use LTO,
e.g. sandbox_flattree ?

Regards,
Simon