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Add -Z no-unique-section-names to reduce ELF header bloat. This change adds a new compiler flag that can help reduce the size of ELF binaries that contain many functions. By default, when enabling function sections (which is the default for most targets), the LLVM backend will generate different section names for each function. For example, a function `func` would generate a section called `.text.func`. Normally this is fine because the linker will merge all those sections into a single one in the binary. However, starting with [LLVM 12](https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/ee5d1a04), the backend will also generate unique section names for exception handling, resulting in thousands of `.gcc_except_table.*` sections ending up in the final binary because some linkers like LLD don't currently merge or strip these EH sections (see discussion [here](https://reviews.llvm.org/D83655)). This can bloat the ELF headers and string table significantly in binaries that contain many functions. The new option is analogous to Clang's `-fno-unique-section-names`, and instructs LLVM to generate the same `.text` and `.gcc_except_table` section for each function, resulting in a smaller final binary. The motivation to add this new option was because we have a binary that ended up with so many ELF sections (over 65,000) that it broke some existing ELF tools, which couldn't handle so many sections. Here's our old binary: ``` $ readelf --sections old.elf | head -1 There are 71746 section headers, starting at offset 0x2a246508: $ readelf --sections old.elf | grep shstrtab [71742] .shstrtab STRTAB 0000000000000000 2977204c ad44bb 00 0 0 1 ``` That's an 11MB+ string table. Here's the new binary using this option: ``` $ readelf --sections new.elf | head -1 There are 43 section headers, starting at offset 0x29143ca8: $ readelf --sections new.elf | grep shstrtab [40] .shstrtab STRTAB 0000000000000000 29143acc 0001db 00 0 0 1 ``` The whole binary size went down by over 20MB, which is quite significant. |
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| Cargo.toml | ||
| README.md | ||
The codegen crate contains the code to convert from MIR into LLVM IR,
and then from LLVM IR into machine code. In general it contains code
that runs towards the end of the compilation process.
For more information about how codegen works, see the rustc dev guide.