The LLVM gold plugin¶

Introduction¶

Building with link time optimization requires cooperation from the system linker. LTO support on Linux systems requires that you use the gold linker or ld.bfd from binutils >= 2.21.51.0.2, as they support LTO via plugins. This is the same mechanism used by the GCC LTO project.

The LLVM gold plugin implements the gold plugin interface on top of libLTO. The same plugin can also be used by other tools such as ar and nm.

How to build it¶

Check for plugin support by running /usr/bin/ld -plugin. If it complains “missing argument” then you have plugin support. If not, such as an “unknown option” error then you will either need to build gold or install a recent version of ld.bfd with plugin support and then build gold plugin.

Download, configure and build ld.bfd with plugin support:
```
$ git clone --depth 1 git://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git binutils
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../binutils/configure --disable-werror # ld.bfd includes plugin support by default
$ make all-ld
```
That should leave you with build/ld/ld-new which supports the -plugin option. Running make will additionally build build/binutils/ar and nm-new binaries supporting plugins.
Build the LLVMgold plugin. Run CMake with -DLLVM_BINUTILS_INCDIR=/path/to/binutils/include. The correct include path will contain the file plugin-api.h.

Usage¶

The linker takes a -plugin option that points to the path of the plugin .so file. To find out what link command gcc would run in a given situation, run gcc -v [...] and look for the line where it runs collect2. Replace that with ld-new -plugin /path/to/LLVMgold.so to test it out. Once you’re ready to switch to using gold, backup your existing /usr/bin/ld then replace it with ld-new.

You should produce bitcode files from clang with the option -flto. This flag will also cause clang to look for the gold plugin in the lib directory under its prefix and pass the -plugin option to ld. It will not look for an alternate linker, which is why you need gold to be the installed system linker in your path.

ar and nm also accept the -plugin option and it’s possible to to install LLVMgold.so to /usr/lib/bfd-plugins for a seamless setup. If you built your own gold, be sure to install the ar and nm-new you built to /usr/bin.

Example of link time optimization¶

The following example shows a worked example of the gold plugin mixing LLVM bitcode and native code.

--- a.c ---
#include <stdio.h>

extern void foo1(void);
extern void foo4(void);

void foo2(void) {
  printf("Foo2\n");
}

void foo3(void) {
  foo4();
}

int main(void) {
  foo1();
}

--- b.c ---
#include <stdio.h>

extern void foo2(void);

void foo1(void) {
  foo2();
}

void foo4(void) {
  printf("Foo4");
}

--- command lines ---
$ clang -flto a.c -c -o a.o      # <-- a.o is LLVM bitcode file
$ ar q a.a a.o                   # <-- a.a is an archive with LLVM bitcode
$ clang b.c -c -o b.o            # <-- b.o is native object file
$ clang -flto a.a b.o -o main    # <-- link with LLVMgold plugin

Gold informs the plugin that foo3 is never referenced outside the IR, leading LLVM to delete that function. However, unlike in the libLTO example gold does not currently eliminate foo4.

Quickstart for using LTO with autotooled projects¶

Once your system ld, ar, and nm all support LLVM bitcode, everything is in place for an easy to use LTO build of autotooled projects:

Follow the instructions on how to build LLVMgold.so.
Install the newly built binutils to $PREFIX
Copy Release/lib/LLVMgold.so to $PREFIX/lib/bfd-plugins/

Set environment variables ($PREFIX is where you installed clang and binutils):

export CC="$PREFIX/bin/clang -flto"
export CXX="$PREFIX/bin/clang++ -flto"
export AR="$PREFIX/bin/ar"
export NM="$PREFIX/bin/nm"
export RANLIB=/bin/true #ranlib is not needed, and doesn't support .bc files in .a

Or you can just set your path:

export PATH="$PREFIX/bin:$PATH"
export CC="clang -flto"
export CXX="clang++ -flto"
export RANLIB=/bin/true

Configure and build the project as usual:
```
% ./configure && make && make check
```

The environment variable settings may work for non-autotooled projects too, but you may need to set the LD environment variable as well.

Licensing¶

Gold is licensed under the GPLv3. LLVMgold uses the interface file plugin-api.h from gold which means that the resulting LLVMgold.so binary is also GPLv3. This can still be used to link non-GPLv3 programs just as much as gold could without the plugin.