GitLab

Currently, clang LTO built vmlinux won't work with pahole.
LTO introduced cross-cu dwarf tag references and broke
current pahole model which handles one cu as a time.
The solution is to merge all cu's as one pahole cu as in [1].
We would like to do this merging only if cross-cu dwarf
references happens. The LTO build mode is a pretty good
indication for that.

In earlier version of this patch ([2]), clang flag
-grecord-gcc-switches is proposed to add to compilation flags
so pahole could detect "-flto" and then merging cu's.
This will increate the binary size of 1% without LTO though.

Arnaldo suggested to use a note to indicate the vmlinux
is built with LTO. Such a cheap way to get whether the vmlinux
is built with LTO or not helps pahole but is also useful
for tracing as LTO may inline/delete/demote global functions,
promote static functions, etc.

So this patch added an elfnote with a new type LINUX_ELFNOTE_LTO_INFO.
The owner of the note is "...