On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 6:29 PM, H.J. Lu <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> The initial implementation of my proposal is available on hjl/lto-mixed
>> branch at
>>
>> http://git.kernel.org/?p=devel/binutils/hjl/x86.git;a=summary
>
> I don't know how to separate this idea from the other work on that branch.
It is implemented on top of 2 stage linking infrastructure.
> I'm concerned that this idea appears to deeply embeds knowledge about
> LTO into the linker
> proper. One of the goals of the plugin approach was to have a clean
> separation, to give us
> more flexibility going forward. I say "appears to" because I'm not
> sure I entirely understand
> the proposal. The text is rather sketchy and I haven't seen the patch.
If you have specific questions, please just ask.
> For example, I think it would be a mistake for the linker to know the
> magic names that
> we currently use for LTO sections, and it would definitely be a
> mistake for the linker to
> know anything about the format of the data they contain.
Linker knows nothing about the magic names.
* Linker action:
o Classify each input object file:
* If there is a ".gnu_object_only" section, it is a mixed object file.
* If there is a IR section, it is an IR object file.
Linker checks if an object is claimed by the plugin. If yes,
it has an IR section. Otherwise, it has no IR.
* Otherwise, it is a non-IR object file.
--
H.J.
