ARM: 9404/1: arm32: enable HAVE_LD_DEAD_CODE_DATA_ELIMINATION
authorYuntao Liu <liuyuntao12@huawei.com>
Mon, 3 Jun 2024 15:37:50 +0000 (16:37 +0100)
committerRussell King (Oracle) <rmk+kernel@armlinux.org.uk>
Mon, 10 Jun 2024 11:01:33 +0000 (12:01 +0100)
commited0f941022515ff40473ea5335769a5dc2524a3f
treefbcd483c062849dc96c681be2ceaa4d0766e51de
parent9ac7ba12d37b4c24f6db675ff7edb7e54f597a59
ARM: 9404/1: arm32: enable HAVE_LD_DEAD_CODE_DATA_ELIMINATION

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: Yuntao Liu <liuyuntao12@huawei.com>
Tested-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Reviewed-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Reviewed-by: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Russell King (Oracle) <rmk+kernel@armlinux.org.uk>
arch/arm/Kconfig
arch/arm/boot/compressed/vmlinux.lds.S
arch/arm/include/asm/vmlinux.lds.h
arch/arm/kernel/entry-armv.S
arch/arm/kernel/vmlinux-xip.lds.S
arch/arm/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile