Shrinking the kernel with link-time optimization

This is the second article of a series discussing various methods of reducing the size of the Linux kernel to make it suitable for small environments. The first article provided a short rationale for this topic, and covered the link-time garbage collection, also called the ld --gc-sections method. We've seen that, though it is pretty straightforward, link-time garbage collection has issues of its own when applied to the kernel, making achieving optimal results more difficult than it is worth. In this article we'll have a look at what the compiler itself can do using link-time optimization.

Full Story (comments: 26)