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>
Yonghong Song