kbuild: add an elfnote for whether vmlinux is built with lto
authorYonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Thu, 1 Apr 2021 23:27:23 +0000 (16:27 -0700)
committerMasahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
Sat, 24 Apr 2021 20:25:42 +0000 (05:25 +0900)
commit1fdd7433a98a2f5511f49ad3f3b82bdd6f77265c
tree40e453e9523913b43cba5d62f288c5810dfa37cf
parent6e74bc4c84546ddbf67ed0f4d45284c9bb153846
kbuild: add an elfnote for whether vmlinux is built with lto

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: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <arnaldo.melo@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Reviewed-by: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Tested-by: Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@gmail.com> # LLVM/Clang v12.0.0-rc4 (x86-64)
Tested-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
include/linux/elfnote-lto.h [new file with mode: 0644]
init/version.c
scripts/mod/modpost.c