Re: [PATCH 04/13] Kbuild: Rust support

[Miguel Ojeda]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 8:03 PM Nick Desaulniers
<ndesaulniers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Until then, I don't see why we need to permit developers to express
> such flexibility for just the Rust code, or have it differ from the
> intent of the C code. Does it make sense to set RUST_OPT_LEVEL_3 and
> CC_OPTIMIZE_FOR_SIZE? I doubt it. That doesn't seem like a development
> feature, but a mistake.  YAGNI.  Instead developers should clarify
> what they care about in terms of high level intent; if someone wants
> to micromanage optimization level flags in their forks they don't need
> a Kconfig to do it (they're either going to hack KBUILD_CFLAGS,
> CFLAGS_*.o, or KCFLAGS), and there's probably better mechanisms for
> fine-tooth precision of optimizing actually hot code or not via PGO
> and AutoFDO.

I completely agree when we are talking about higher level optimization
levels. From a user perspective, it does not make much sense to want
slightly different optimizations levels or different size/performance
trade-offs between C and Rust. However, I am thinking from the
debugging side, i.e. mostly low or no optimization; rather than about
micromanaging optimizations for performance.

For instance, last year I used `RUST_OPT_LEVEL_0/1` to quickly rule
out optimizer/codegen/etc. bugs on the Rust side when we had some
memory corruption over Rust data
(https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/pull/28), which is important
when dealing with compiler nightly versions. It was also nice to be
able to easily follow along when stepping, too.

Having said that, I agree that in those cases one can simply tweak the
flags manually -- so that's why I said it is fine dropping the the
`Kconfig` options. There might be some advantages of having them, such
as making developers aware that those builds should work, to keep them
tested/working, etc.; but we can do that manually too in the CI/docs
too.

Cheers,
Miguel