The gold linker and KDE

[Andreas Hartmetz]

Hi all,

I am one of the few KDEers who tried to link KDE4 using the upcoming linker in 
GNU binutils called "gold". gold fails if it encounters an unimplemented 
option (I guess it should ignore some less important ones instead) and it 
seems to be less forgiving when given an incomplete list of required 
libraries. The upside is that in pure link time gold is reportedly 5 to 6 
times faster than the old ld.
We obviously want to use gold at some point, right? :)
I worked around the unknown options problem by hacking the gold options 
parser. In kdebase I added libdl to nspluginviewer's libraries. After that 
kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase compiled and linked. When running 
the resulting binaries, however, knotify4 crashed every time it tried to play 
a sound because, apparently, the loading of phonon's xine backend failed. 
pusling on #kde-devel suggested that the xine backend itself might not be 
linked properly.
Can you guess what might go wrong here? Ideally somebody who knows linking and 
the build system very well would try to link KDE with gold and fix everything 
necessary to make it work... I think that the gold maintainer will also fix 
obvious bugs quickly when asked.
Another strange behavior (for the uninitiated) is that setting the linker to 
gold using ccmake will not have any effect. Maybe this is because gcc/g++ 
will be used as the frontend to ld and you can't really tell it which linker 
to use? This matters becaues just copying gold over ld will break compilation 
of KDE3 and probably many other applications which seem to have sloppy 
dependency lists.

Cheers,
Andreas

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