Re: [GIT] kbuild/lto changes for 3.15-rc1

Linus Torvalds
2014-04-08T15:26:10Z

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz> wrote:
>
> besides the kbuild branch, here is the LTO build support by Andi. It is
> a separate branch, because it depends on other patches by Andi which
> were merged through other trees. The link-time-optimization build is an
> experimental feature, so there one kconfig option to enable it and
> another kconfig option to disable it (behind a door with a sign "Beware
> of the Leopard"...), so that it is not enabled by
> allmodconfig/allyesconfig.

So right now, I see several reasons not to merge it ("It's so
experimental that we don't even want to encourage people to test it"
to "it's not fully fleshed out yet and makes compile times _much_
longer").

And yet nobody has actually talked about why I *should* merge it.

Which - I think understandably - makes me less than enthusiastic.

So I think I'll let this wait a bit longer, _unless_ people start
talking about the upsides. How much smaller is the end result? How
much faster is it? How much more beautiful is it? Does it make new
cool things possible? Are those cool things really close on the
horizon and really want this merged even though it's not really quite
ready yet?

So please: convince me. Andi?

Linus