• Yuntao Liu's avatar
    ARM: 9404/1: arm32: enable HAVE_LD_DEAD_CODE_DATA_ELIMINATION · ed0f9410
    Yuntao Liu authored
    The current arm32 architecture does not yet support the
    HAVE_LD_DEAD_CODE_DATA_ELIMINATION feature. arm32 is widely used in
    embedded scenarios, and enabling this feature would be beneficial for
    reducing the size of the kernel image.
    
    In order to make this work, we keep the necessary tables by annotating
    them with KEEP, also it requires further changes to linker script to KEEP
    some tables and wildcard compiler generated sections into the right place.
    When using ld.lld for linking, KEEP is not recognized within the OVERLAY
    command, and Ard proposed a concise method to solve this problem.
    
    It boots normally with defconfig, vexpress_defconfig and tinyconfig.
    
    The size comparison of zImage is as follows:
    defconfig       vexpress_defconfig      tinyconfig
    5137712         5138024                 424192          no dce
    5032560         4997824                 298384          dce
    2.0%            2.7%                    29.7%           shrink
    
    When using smaller config file, there is a significant reduction in the
    size of the zImage.
    
    We also tested this patch on a commercially available single-board
    computer, and the comparison is as follows:
    a15eb_config
    2161384         no dce
    2092240         dce
    3.2%            shrink
    
    The zImage size has been reduced by approximately 3.2%, which is 70KB on
    2.1M.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarYuntao Liu <liuyuntao12@huawei.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarArnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarArnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarLinus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRussell King (Oracle) <rmk+kernel@armlinux.org.uk>
    ed0f9410
vmlinux.lds.S 3.42 KB