On Wed, 15 Nov 2017 13:34:22 -0800
Sami Tolvanen [off-list ref] wrote:

This change adds the configuration option CONFIG_LTO_CLANG, and
build system support for clang's Link Time Optimization (LTO). In
preparation for LTO support for other compilers, potentially common
parts of the changes are gated behind CONFIG_LTO instead.

With -flto, instead of object files, clang produces LLVM bitcode,
which is compiled into a native object at link time, allowing the
final binary to be optimized globally. For more details, see:

  https://llvm.org/docs/LinkTimeOptimization.html

While the kernel normally uses GNU ld for linking, LLVM supports LTO
only with lld or GNU gold linkers. This patch set assumes gold will
be used with the LLVMgold plug-in to perform the LTO link step. Due
to potential incompatibilities with GNU ld, this change also adds
LDFINAL_vmlinux for using a different linker for the vmlinux_link
step, and defaults to using GNU ld.

Assuming LLVMgold.so is in LD_LIBRARY_PATH and CONFIG_LTO_CLANG has
been selected, an LTO kernel can be built simply by running make
CC=clang. Recommended versions are >= 5.0 for clang, and >= 2.27 for
binutils.

Do you have any kind of numbers for this, out of curiosity? Binary
size, performance, build time?

Also

Why is this needed? It would have been nice to get rid of the
!THIN_ARCHIVES option if you can make the patches work with the
thin archives paths.

Thanks,
Nick