[PATCH v8 04/16] kbuild: lto: limit inlining

Sami Tolvanen
2020-12-01T21:39:37Z

This change limits function inlining across translation unit boundaries
in order to reduce the binary size with LTO. The -import-instr-limit
flag defines a size limit, as the number of LLVM IR instructions, for
importing functions from other TUs, defaulting to 100.

Based on testing with arm64 defconfig, we found that a limit of 5 is a
reasonable compromise between performance and binary size, reducing the
size of a stripped vmlinux by 11%.

Suggested-by: George Burgess IV <gbiv@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
---
Makefile | 3 +++
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 222ae96d179d..ac836907d8b1 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -899,6 +899,9 @@ else
CC_FLAGS_LTO += -flto
endif
CC_FLAGS_LTO += -fvisibility=default
+
+# Limit inlining across translation units to reduce binary size
+KBUILD_LDFLAGS += -mllvm -import-instr-limit=5
endif

ifdef CONFIG_LTO
--
2.29.2.576.ga3fc446d84-goog