On Tue, 2021-06-22 at 14:02 +0100, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc-help wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jun 2021 at 14:42, Chris S wrote:
> > Is it possible to build static libraries that have LTO optimizations
> > applied to the object code they contain (that is, all the code in
> > that
> > library is optimized together with LTO), but when built together
> > into a
> > final binary, no additional LTO is performed? We have several
> > large,
> > static libraries that are mostly unrelated, and are looking for ways
> > to
> > reduce a massive increase in build times after moving to g++10,
> > where
> > almost 80% of the time is spent in LTO. Having optimized individual
> > libraries but not a global optimized binary might be a reasonable
> > tradeoff. Is this possible?
I tried "gcc -Wl,--whole-archive lib.a -Wl,-r -nostdlib -flinker-
output=nolto-rel -o lib.o", which seems working for a very simple
testcase. But I'm not sure if it's really correct.
> A static library is just an archive file containing object files. No
> LTO is done "between" those files, they're just added to the archive.
> That's because creating a static library is not "linking".
>
> If you do not use -flto when doing the final link, you might as well
> not use -flto when compiling the objects that go into your static
> library, because otherwise you're adding all the extra LTO information
> to the objects and then ignoring it when linking.
It's not "extra" information. Object files created with -flto only
contains GIMPLE which can only be linked with LTO enabled, the "normal"
object code is not there. For example, if lib.a contains several object
files compiled with -flto:
cc main.c lib.a -flto # main.c is compiled with LTO, and LTO will
# run for main.o and object files in lib.a
cc main.c lib.a # main.c is not compiled with LTO, but LTO
# will still run for object files in lib.a
cc main.c lib.a -fno-lto # error, linker will say
# "plugin needed to handle lto object"
(Unless -ffat-lto-objects is used.)
--
Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
School of Aerospace Science and Technology, Xidian University
