Dear Wolfgang Denk,
Dear Marek Vasut,
In message 1351701168-7293-1-git-send-email-marex@denx.de you wrote:
Flip over from linking with LD to linking with GCC. This has some long-term benefits, like easy path to enabling LTO.
Could you please explain these supposed benefits in a bit more detail?
Yes, thanks for the review (I really needed one from you on this)!
So, here comes the list: 1) It's cool to link with gcc, duh ;-) 2) You can enable LTO eventually -- long term plan -- which proved can shrink the code size a bit 3) Usage of LLVM/CLANG is now much more straightforward 4) Binutils usually lag behind the GCC development a bit, by using GCC to do the link, we can remedy this problem
But actually, the 2) is the most important part. LTO will hopefully help us optimize U-Boot for size even better than it is now. But that will still need much more research. So this is only a patch that shall prepare the groundwork for this further research.
Please excuse my ignorance, but so far I see just added complexity, but I don't see what it buys us.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
Best regards, Marek Vasut