[PATCH 1/2] kbuild: Remove '-mno-global-merge'

Nathan Chancellor
2022-03-30T23:46:08Z

This flag is specific to clang, where it is only used by the 32-bit and
64-bit ARM backends. In certain situations, the presence of this flag
will cause a warning, as shown by commit 6580c5c18fb3 ("um: clang: Strip
out -mno-global-merge from USER_CFLAGS").

Since commit 61163efae020 ("kbuild: LLVMLinux: Add Kbuild support for
building kernel with Clang") that added this flag back in 2014, there
have been quite a few changes to the GlobalMerge pass in LLVM. Building
several different ARCH=arm and ARCH=arm64 configurations with LLVM 11
(minimum) and 15 (current main version) with this flag removed (i.e.,
with the default of '-mglobal-merge') reveals no modpost warnings, so it
is likely that the issue noted in the comment is no longer relevant due
to changes in LLVM or modpost, meaning this flag can be removed.

If any new warnings show up that are a result of the removal of this
flag, it can be added back under arch/arm{,64}/Makefile to avoid
warnings on other architectures.

Signed-off-by: Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>
---
Makefile | 4 ----
1 file changed, 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index daeb5c88b50b..f2723d9bfca4 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -784,10 +784,6 @@ ifdef CONFIG_CC_IS_CLANG
KBUILD_CPPFLAGS += -Qunused-arguments
# The kernel builds with '-std=gnu89' so use of GNU extensions is acceptable.
KBUILD_CFLAGS += -Wno-gnu
-# CLANG uses a _MergedGlobals as optimization, but this breaks modpost, as the
-# source of a reference will be _MergedGlobals and not on of the whitelisted names.
-# See modpost pattern 2
-KBUILD_CFLAGS += -mno-global-merge
else

# gcc inanely warns about local variables called 'main'
--
2.35.1