BSDCan2016 - v1.1.24a
BSDCan 2016
The Technical BSD Conference
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
|
Davide Italiano |
|
Rafael Ávila de Espíndola |
| Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Day | Talks #2 - 11 June - 2016-06-11 |
| Room | DMS 1120 |
| Start time | 16:00 |
| Duration | 01:00 |
| Info | |
| ID | 656 |
| Event type | Lecture |
| Track | Hacking |
| Language used for presentation | English |
LLD: A new linker for FreeBSD
The default linker shipped with FreeBSD base system (the last GPLv2 version of GNU ld) is showing its age. Lack of LTO, missing support for newer architectures (e.g. AArch64) and poor performances are increasing problems over time. As a supporting evidence of this thesis, DragonflyBSD recently switched from GNU ld 2.7 to gold (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release44/).
FreeBSD ships with external toolchain support for those architectures which support is missing but this has maintainability problems. This talk explores LLD, a new BSD-licensed linker developed as part of the LLVM project. LLD is thought to be fast (early test show it being at least on par with gold while linking LLVM itself) and quasi-compatible with GNU ld. We take a look at the history and overall design of LLD and propose a path to integrate it in FreeBSD-11.