Re: [PATCH v2 18/18] arm64: select ARCH_SUPPORTS_LTO_CLANG

[Sami Tolvanen]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 11:58:11AM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> I'll be honest with you: I'm absolutely terrified about enabling this.

That's understandable, I wouldn't want to enable this by default
quite yet either. This patch doesn't enable LTO for arm64, just makes
it possible to enable the feature. I'm perfectly fine with marking
CONFIG_LTO_CLANG experimental if it makes people more comfortable.

> How much testing has this seen?

I've been running clang LTO kernels for a few months on a Pixel 2 device
without any issues. This is on a 4.4 kernel though.

> Right now, the C standard isn't on our side here and we're relying on
> the compiler not doing this kind of thing. Can we continue to rely on
> that in the face of LTO?

I'll have to check with our LLVM experts, but I have not run into these
issues with current compiler versions. Looking at Andi's old patches,
looks like gcc might be more aggressive in reordering things with LTO
than clang.

Sami