Use @rpath instead of @executable_path in dylibs, since it allows us to be
more flexible when placing dylibs in the app.
In particular with this change it's trivial to put libmonosgen-2.0.dylib in
the container app, and reference it from extensions.
This is a series of fixes to the dynamic libraries we build / create to remove
any unnecessary bloat (unused architectures, bitcode).
A brand new watchOS app with no changes goes from 35MB to 11MB with these
fixes (with incremental builds disabled, the app size is 10MB).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* [runtime] Split list of architectures into simulator and device-specific lists.
* [runtime] Build separate dylibs for device and simulator.
Build separate dylibs for device and simulator, since we already install these
into different locations.
This makes both the simulator and device builds slightly faster (since the
respective dylibs are smaller, and less data to copy around).
For watchOS apps, this saves ~430kb.
* [runtime] Strip bitcode from dylibs. Fixes#51352.
We know that dylibs will never be shipped to the App Store, so we'll never
need them to have bitcode.
So just strip the bitcode from all our dylibs, since this makes apps with
fastdev significantly smaller (and thus much faster to upload to watch
devices).
For watchOS apps this is a very significant improvement: a branch new watchOS
app without any changes goes from 35MB to 17MB.
https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=51352
* [mtouch] Fix dylib compilation to not embed full bitcode.
Facts
=====
a. The output from the AOT compiler is an assembly (.s) file.
b. Clang's assembler does not support -fembed-bitcode-marker (only -fembed-
bitcode), so when we ask clang to -fembed-bitcode-marker, the assembler
receives a -fembed-bitcode argument.
c. This means that the assembled object file does not contain the
__LLVM/__bitcode and __LLVM/__cmdline sections (it does however contain an
__LLVM/__asm section).
d. The native linker will create a bitcode assembly section if none of the
object files passed to the linker contain a __LLVM/__bitcode section and
there's an __LLVM/__asm section present.
e. The end result is that when we build to a dylib, we end up (unexpectedly,
because we ask Clang to -fembed-bitcode-marker) including both armv7k and
bitcode in the dylib, thus bloating the dylib size significantly.
Solution
========
We manually add the __LLVM/__bitcode and __LLVM/__cmdline sections to the .s
file Mono's AOT compiler generated. This way the .o file will have the magic
sections, and the linker will not include bitcode (only the bitcode marker) in
the final library.
An empty watchOS extension with incremental builds is now 6MB smaller (down
to 11MB from 17MB).
64-bit iOS 9+ devices have a pagesize of 16kb (even when running 32-bit apps).
This means all executable code must have sectors aligned to 16kb when running
on such devices.
The native linker uses the min iOS version to determine the sector alignment;
if min iOS version is < 8.0, then the sector alignment is 4k, otherwise 16k.
This means that when we create our 32-bit dylibs we must link them with a min
iOS version of 8.0, or they won't work on a 64-bit device in a 32-bit app (bug
So change our makefiles to link armv7[s] dylibs with min iOS version 8.0.
[1] https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43102
Rolf Bjarne Kvinge
Chris Hamons