While timing a "no-op" build of the kernel (incrementally building the
kernel even though nothing changed) in the Chrome OS build system I
found that it was much slower than I expected.

Digging into things a bit, I found that quite a bit of the time was
spent invoking the C compiler even though we weren't actually building
anything.  Currently in the Chrome OS build system the C compiler is
called through a number of wrappers (one of which is written in
python!) and can take upwards of 100 ms to invoke even if we're not
doing anything difficult, so these invocations of the compiler were
taking a lot of time.  Worse the invocations couldn't seem to take
advantage of the multiple cores on my system.

Certainly it seems like we could make the compiler invocations in the
Chrome OS build system faster, but only to a point.  Inherently
invoking a program as big as a C compiler is a fairly heavy
operation.  Thus even if we can speed the compiler calls it made sense
to track down what was happening.

It turned out that all the compiler invocations were coming from
usages like this in the kernel's Makefile:

KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(call cc-option,-fno-delete-null-pointer-checks,)

Due to the way cc-option and similar statements work the above
contains an implicit call to the C compiler.  ...and due to the fact
that we're storing the result in KBUILD_CFLAGS, a simply expanded
variable, the call will happen every time the Makefile is parsed, even
if there are no users of KBUILD_CFLAGS.

Rather than redoing this computation every time, it makes a lot of
sense to cache the result of all of the Makefile's compiler calls just
like we do when we compile a ".c" file to a ".o" file.  Conceptually
this is quite a simple idea.  ...and since the calls to invoke the
compiler and similar tools are centrally located in the Kbuild.include
file this doesn't even need to be super invasive.

Implementing the cache in a simple-to-use and efficient way is not
quite as simple as it first sounds, though.  To get maximum speed we
really want the cache in a format that make can natively understand
and make doesn't really have an ability to load/parse files. ...but
make _can_ import other Makefiles, so the solution is to store the
cache in Makefile format.  This requires coming up with a valid/unique
Makefile variable name for each value to be cached, but that's
solvable with some cleverness.

After this change, we'll automatically create a ".cache.mk" file that
will contain our cached variables.  We'll load this on each invocation
of make and will avoid recomputing anything that's already in our
cache.  The cache is stored in a format that it shouldn't need any
invalidation since anything that might change should affect the "key"
and any old cached value won't be used.
Signed-off-by: Douglas Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>
Tested-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>