Re: [PATCH v3 04/20] kbuild: do not sort nm output where the order is irrelevant

From: Kees Cook

Date: Thu Sep 17 2026 - 16:39:03 EST


On Thu, Sep 17, 2026 at 05:06:14PM +0100, Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) wrote:
> There are places where this is unnecessary - an invocation from
> scripts/sorttable every vmlinux link, scripts/check-function-names.sh run
> after every vmlinux.o link, and the x86 VOFFSET and ZOFFSET listings
> between vmlinux and bzImage.
> [...]
> before after delta
> ---------------------------------
> x86 defconfig, touch mm/vma.c, gcc 9.7s 9.5s -0.18s (-2%)
> x86 defconfig, touch mm/vma.c, clang 9.3s 9.0s -0.27s (-3%)
> x86 defconfig, clean, gcc 30.3s 30.1s -0.16s (-1%)
> x86 defconfig, clean, clang 31.7s 31.2s -0.55s (-2%)
> x86 allmodconfig, touch mm/vma.c, clang 36.4s 35.8s -0.67s (-2%)
>
> Assisted-by: LLM
> Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <ljs@xxxxxxxxxx>

Not a huge boost, but it's a trivial change with a deterministic improvement.

Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <kees@xxxxxxxxxx>

--
Kees Cook