repo/extra/mold

Mold
________________________________________________________________________________

mold is a multi-threaded, high-performance linker that is several times faster
than the industry-standard ones, namely, GNU ld, GNU gold or LLVM lld. It is
developed as a drop-in replacement for these linkers and command-line compatible
with them with a few exceptions.


Caveats
________________________________________________________________________________

* mold can not yet link the kernel.
* LTO is not yet supported (so refrain from using it)

If a package fails to link with mold, open an issue at $/kisslinux/repo and
(until it is fixed) revert to using your previous linker for said package.


Usage
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The linker is typically located at /usr/bin/ld and is invoked by the compiler.
To use mold as the system linker, one of the following methods must be used.

1. Use the alternatives system to set mold as the system linker.

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                              |
|   $ kiss a mold /usr/bin/ld                                                  |
|                                                                              |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

2. Add --ld-path to CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS (Clang > 12.0)

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                              |
|   $ export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -ld-path=/usr/bin/mold"                           |
|   $ export CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS -ld-path=/usr/bin/mold"                       |
|                                                                              |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

3. Add -B to CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS (GCC)

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                              |
|   $ export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -B/usr/lib/mold"                                  |
|   $ export CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS -B/usr/lib/mold"                              |
|                                                                              |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+


Verification
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To verify that mold is being used, disable binary stripping (KISS_STRIP=0) and
run the following command on a newly build executable. If 'mold' appears in the
output, everything is setup correctly.

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                              |
|   $ readelf -p .comment /path/to/exe                                         |
|                                                                              |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+


Further Reading
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* $/rui314/mold