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.