[cfe-dev] Should -nostdlib control runtime libraries?

[Petr Hosek via cfe-dev]

We're trying to enable profile instrumentation in our kernel. We would
like to use -fprofile-instr-generate to enable the instrumentation,
but provide our own runtime instead of the one that's part of
compiler-rt which isn't compatible with the kernel environment.
However, there's no way to tell the driver to avoid linking the
runtime. This is the case not only for profile runtime, but for other
runtimes like XRay or sanitizers as well.

-nostdlib already controls whether system libraries are being linked
into binary. Furthermore, when compiler-rt builtins are being used, it
also controls whether those are being linked as well. This is somewhat
inconsistent with other compiler runtimes mentioned above.

Two potential solutions I came up with are:

1. Change -nostdlib to affect linking of runtime libraries. This would
make it consistent with the behavior it has when using compiler-rt
builtins. However, it would also make it inconsistent with GCC, e.g.
when you use --coverage -nostdlib, GCC would still pass -lgcov to the
linker.

2. Introduce a new flag, e.g. -nortlib, that would control linking of
runtime libraries, including compiler-rt builtins.

Do you have any opinion on this or any other suggestions?