[PATCH v2 18/21] kbuild: rust: optionally parallelise rustc front end

[Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM)]

Rust crates are compiled in a serial chain on the critical path - core,
bindings, kernel crates and then the drivers - each a rustc invocation.

With CONFIG_RUST set and every rust driver enabled, the entire chain takes
around 25 seconds on a 128-thread machine, with the associated C code
taking 24 seconds.

Each time a change is made to any of the bindings, it triggers a rebuild.

rustc has a parallel front end, enabled with -Zthreads, available since
rust 1.84 [0] and therefore on every rustc the kernel supports.

It is not yet stable and its output is not reproducible, so it cannot be
used by default - stabilisation is being worked on [1].

Add optional build parameter KBUILD_RUST_THREADS, which when set passes
that many threads to rustc.

The threads are taken from make's jobserver, so a parallel build is not
oversubscribed. It was found that benefits level off at 8 threads (16 was
found to be around the same, and 32 slower).

Generated output was confirmed byte-for-byte identical.

Observed build time changes with KBUILD_RUST_THREADS=8 (rustc 1.98, clang):

                                        before    after
  core.o                                   7.7s     4.9s
  bindings.o                               4.3s     3.1s
  kernel.o                                 2.0s     1.4s
  clean build                             39.3s    34.6s
  touch rust/kernel/lib.rs                12.9s    12.1s
  touch rust/bindings/bindings_helper.h   19.5s    17.5s

Whole build, 128-thread Threadripper 9980X, KBUILD_RUST_THREADS=8, best of
N runs:

                                         before   after     delta
                                         -------------------------------
  x86 defconfig+RUST, clean               41.0s    36.4s     -4.6s (-11%)
  x86 defconfig+RUST, touch lib.rs         8.3s     7.7s    -0.56s (-7%)

Link: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/132282 [0]
Link: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/1005 [1]
Assisted-by: LLM
Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <ljs@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
 Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst | 7 +++++++
 Makefile                        | 4 ++++
 2 files changed, 11 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst b/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst
index 5a9013bacfb7..9b2b127676c3 100644
--- a/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst
+++ b/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst
@@ -134,6 +134,13 @@ See make help for the full list.
 
 Setting "V=..." takes precedence over KBUILD_VERBOSE.
 
+KBUILD_RUST_THREADS
+-------------------
+The number of threads rustc's parallel front end may use, passed to it as
+``-Zthreads``. Unset by default, as the parallel front end is not yet
+stable and its output is not reproducible. The gain levels off at 8
+threads.
+
 KBUILD_EXTMOD
 -------------
 Set the directory to look for the kernel source when building external
diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 8263fc8a86b3..4ef504c1ace2 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -1206,6 +1206,10 @@ KBUILD_RUSTFLAGS += --remap-path-prefix=$(srcroot)/= --remap-path-scope=macro
 endif
 endif
 
+ifneq ($(KBUILD_RUST_THREADS),)
+KBUILD_RUSTFLAGS += -Zthreads=$(KBUILD_RUST_THREADS)
+endif
+
 # include additional Makefiles when needed
 include-y			:= scripts/Makefile.warn
 include-$(CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO)	+= scripts/Makefile.debug

-- 
2.55.0