[llvm-dev] Proposal for address-significance tables for --icf=safe

[Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev]

Hi all,

Context: ld.gold has an --icf=safe flag which is intended to apply ICF only
to sections which can be safely merged according to the guarantees provided
by the language. It works using a set of heuristics (symbol name matching
and relocation scanning). That's not only imprecise but it only works with
certain languages and is slow due to the need to demangle symbols and scan
relocations. It's also redundant with the (local_)unnamed_addr analysis
already performed by LLVM.

I implemented an alternative to this approach in clang and lld. It works by
adding a section to each object file containing the indexes of the symbols
which are address-significant (i.e. not (local_)unnamed_addr in IR).

I used this implementation to link clang with release+asserts with each of
--icf={none,safe,all}. The binary sizes were:

none: 109407184
safe: 108534736 (-0.8%)
all: 107281360 (-2%)

I measured the object file overhead of these sections in my clang build at
0.08%. That's almost nothing, and I think it's small enough that we can
turn it on by default.

I've uploaded a patch series for this feature here:
https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/llvm-addrsig
I intend to start sending it for review soon.

Thanks,
-- 
-- 
Peter
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