>Andi reports that runs of the "hackbench" benchmark gain about 5%, while kernel builds don't change much at all. Some networking benchmarks improve as much as 18%.
Does this help point out that the networking code could be better link-optimized, even if the rest of the kernel isn't? I mean, if the kernel is being built with different gcc commandlines anyway, does this mean that the network-code-building bits could perhaps be better optimized?