The gold linker and KDE

[Michael Druing]

Please keep in mind that gold is ELF-only, so it cannot be used to link on
Win32.

Thus, linking KDE with gold must stay an option and shouldn't become the
default (at least until other binary formats are implemented in gold)

-Michael

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andreas Hartmetz [mailto:ahartmetz at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 12:09 AM
> To: kde-buildsystem at kde.org
> Subject: The gold linker and KDE
> 
> 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
> 
> -- 
> - Flint Paper's office is piled high with shot-up criminals 
> and the walls are
>   riddled with bullet  holes and he's kissing a beautiful 
> woman right on the 
>   mouth!
> - Wonder if the munsters are on yet?
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