• Yonghong Song's avatar
    kbuild: add an elfnote for whether vmlinux is built with lto · 1fdd7433
    Yonghong Song authored
    Currently, clang LTO built vmlinux won't work with pahole.
    LTO introduced cross-cu dwarf tag references and broke
    current pahole model which handles one cu as a time.
    The solution is to merge all cu's as one pahole cu as in [1].
    We would like to do this merging only if cross-cu dwarf
    references happens. The LTO build mode is a pretty good
    indication for that.
    
    In earlier version of this patch ([2]), clang flag
    -grecord-gcc-switches is proposed to add to compilation flags
    so pahole could detect "-flto" and then merging cu's.
    This will increate the binary size of 1% without LTO though.
    
    Arnaldo suggested to use a note to indicate the vmlinux
    is built with LTO. Such a cheap way to get whether the vmlinux
    is built with LTO or not helps pahole but is also useful
    for tracing as LTO may inline/delete/demote global functions,
    promote static functions, etc.
    
    So this patch added an elfnote with a new type LINUX_ELFNOTE_LTO_INFO.
    The owner of the note is "Linux".
    
    With gcc 8.4.1 and clang trunk, without LTO, I got
      $ readelf -n vmlinux
      Displaying notes found in: .notes
        Owner                Data size        Description
      ...
        Linux                0x00000004       func
         description data: 00 00 00 00
      ...
    With "readelf -x ".notes" vmlinux", I can verify the above "func"
    with type code 0x101.
    
    With clang thin-LTO, I got the same as above except the following:
         description data: 01 00 00 00
    which indicates the vmlinux is built with LTO.
    
      [1] https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20210325065316.3121287-1-yhs@fb.com/
      [2] https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20210331001623.2778934-1-yhs@fb.com/Suggested-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <arnaldo.melo@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarYonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarNick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
    Tested-by: Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@gmail.com> # LLVM/Clang v12.0.0-rc4 (x86-64)
    Tested-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMasahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
    1fdd7433
version.c 1.14 KB