[Mageia-dev] time to try to build KDE with gold as linker?

[Anssi Hannula]

On 08.09.2011 15:27, Balcaen John wrote:
> Le Jeudi 8 Septembre 2011 13:29:39 Thierry Vignaud a écrit :
>> Hi
>> In order to speed up KDE build which is said to link quite slowly,
>> wouldn't it be time to try to build KDE with gold as linker?
> I can try locally at least (if i can use less than 6 hours to build KDE 
> on BS it would be nice :p ) , however do we have a specific macro to 
> specify using ld.gold instead of ld  (i never played with linker before) 
> ?
> 
> Also from the mandriva thread  [1]. maybe we can considere switching to 
> gold by default for all packages (with somes exceptions for kernel & 
> others packages).

I remember gold being a compromise which has better build speed but
worse run-time performance. However, I haven't seen this mentioned
recently, and as cooker has switched to it, I suspect I may misremember
or this might have changed since.

Can someone confirm that there is indeed no run-time downside to gold?

> Another « solution » could be using alternatives for binutils so a 
> package can simply use gold linker by simply requering a binutils-gold 
> package like it's done in debian ?

I don't like alternatives for any tools related to package building, as
they cause package builds to differ depending on local configuration.

> 
> [1]
> http://mandriva.598463.n5.nabble.com/Cooker-Announcement-binutils-
> changes-switching-to-gold-and-new-behaviour-td4636613.html


-- 
Anssi Hannula