Re: building musl libc.so with gcc -flto

[Andre McCurdy <armccurdy@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 6:44 AM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 11:23:40PM -0700, Andre McCurdy wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
>> > On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 05:16:12PM -0700, Andre McCurdy wrote:
>> >> > OK, it looks like the _dlstart_c symbol got removed before linking the
>> >> > asm. What about selectively compiling this file with -fno-lto via
>> >> > something like this in config.mak:
>> >> >
>> >> > src/ldso/dlstart.lo: CFLAGS += -fno-lto
>> >>
>> >> That works. Should I send a patch?
>> >
>> > Yes, but configure would need to detect support for -fno-lto and add
>> > it appropriately. See what's done for CFLAGS_NOSSP. I suspect the crt
>> > files also need -fno-lto in principle even if they're not currently
>> > breaking for lack of it.
>>
>> Patch sent.
>>
>> I think the crt files might be OK as they are, since the _start_c
>> symbol isn't being hidden?
>
> I think you'll find the exact same thing happens if you use a crt1.o
> produced from crt1.c for static linking with LTO. Note that on i386
> (and x86_64) we still have a crt1.s which overrides crt1.c; I want to
> remove it at some point. Temporarily removing/renaming it yourself
> will allow you to test what happens with LTO on this file.

Yes, you're right. The same workaround is needed for crt1.c, so my
original patch is incomplete.

The next issue, as Khem mentioned, is that AR and RANLIB need to be changed to:

  AR = $(CROSS_COMPILE)gcc-ar
  RANLIB = $(CROSS_COMPILE)gcc-ranlib

Is it safe to use these gcc-xx wrappers in all cases (after having
configure test that the toolchain provides them)? Or should they only
be used with LTO?

Beyond that I'm not able to statically link a hello.c test app using
LTO yet, since LTO linking with .a archives requires the gold linker
and I specifically have that disabled (to avoid issues I had seen
previously with musl+gold+dynamic linking). It looks like I need to
enable gold again before continuing. Are there any known issues, or
known success stories, when using musl with gold?

>
> Rich