[llvm-dev] LLD: time to enable --threads by default

[Rui Ueyama via llvm-dev]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 6:30 PM, Davide Italiano <davide at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 1:20 PM, Rafael Espíndola via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> Thank you for the explanation! That makes sense.
> >>
> >> Unlike ThinLTO, each thread in LLD consumes very small amount of memory
> >> (probably just a few megabytes), so that's not a problem for me. At the
> >> final stage of linking, we spawn threads to copy section contents and
> apply
> >> relocations, and I guess that causes a lot of memory traffic because
> that's
> >> basically memcpy'ing input files to an output file, so the memory
> bandwidth
> >> could be a limiting factor there. But I do not see a reason to limit the
> >> number of threads to the number of physical core. For LLD, it seems
> like we
> >> can just spawn as many threads as HT provides.
> >
> >
> > It is quite common for SMT to *not* be profitable. I did notice some
> > small wins by not using it. On an intel machine you can do a quick
> > check by running with half the threads since they always have 2x SMT.
> >
>
> I had the same experience. Ideally I would like to have a way to
> override the number of threads used by the linker.
> gold has a plethora of options for doing that, i.e.
>
>   --thread-count COUNT        Number of threads to use
>   --thread-count-initial COUNT
>                               Number of threads to use in initial pass
>   --thread-count-middle COUNT Number of threads to use in middle pass
>   --thread-count-final COUNT  Number of threads to use in final pass
>
> I don't think we need the full generality/flexibility of
> initial/middle/final, but --thread-count could be useful (at least for
> experimenting). The current interface of `parallel_for_each` doesn't
> allow to specify the number of threads to be run, so, assuming lld
> goes that route (it may not), that should be extended accordingly.
>

I agree that these options would be useful for testing, but I'm reluctant
to expose them as user options because I wish LLD would just work out of
the box without turning lots of knobs.
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