[OE-core] Selectable linker (ld or gold) per recipe

[Phil Blundell]

On Tue, 2011-09-27 at 10:23 -0700, Khem Raj wrote:
> We have gold and ld available to us as linker alternatives. When
> linking webkit with ld it takes 45 mins and grabs 2G of memory where
> as with gold on same machine
> it took 7 minutes. But then we can not use gold to link glibc and
> kernel and may not work on all supported arches. So gold may not be a
> complete replacement for ld. A good solution is that we make it
> possible
> to choose linker at compile time when building the application. gcc
> does not have provisions to select linker on commandline although it
> has configure
> options to select default linker.

Are there any real-world scenarios where this is actually causing a
problem?  Glibc already has its own private compiler (i.e.
gcc-cross-initial) which it can configure any way it wishes, and the
kernel generally likes to call ld directly rather than via the gcc
driver.  So those two are basically a non-issue as far as gold is
concerned.  The thing about not working on all arches is also something
of an non-problem from this point of view, since if gold doesn't work on
a particular architecture (eg mips, I think) then there can't be any
question about which linker should be selected and specifying it
per-recipe would be pointless.

I'm not necessarily opposed to adding a wrapper to make the linker
selectable per recipe but it does rather seem to me that it's a solution
in search of a problem.  And, if it genuinely is a widespread problem I
would have rather thought that it ought to be tackled in consultation
with gcc upstream, otherwise they might go off and invent a different
mechanism for doing the same thing.

p.