Geek Blight

Some days ago my Igalia colleague Adrián Pérez pointed us to mold, a new drop-in replacement for existing Unix linkers created by the original author of LLVM lld. While mold is pretty new and does not aim to be 100% compatible with GNU ld, GNU gold or LLVM lld (at least as of the time I’m writing this), I noticed the benchmark table in its README file also painted a pretty picture about the performance of lld, if inferior to that of mold.

In my job at Igalia I work most of the time on VK-GL-CTS, Vulkan and OpenGL’s Conformance Test Suite, which contains thousands of tests for OpenGL and Vulkan. These tests are provided by different executable files and the Vulkan tests on which I’m focused are contained in a binary called deqp-vk. When built with debug information, deqp-vk can be quite large. A recent build, for example, is taking 369 MB in my drive. But the worst part is that linking the binary typically takes around 25 seconds on my work laptop.

I had never paid much attention to the linker before, always relying on the default choice in Fedora or any other distribution. However, I decided to install lld, which has an official package, and gave it a try. You Will Not Believe What Happened Next.

lld is capable of correctly linking deqp-vk in 1/10th of the time the default linker (GNU ld) takes to do the same job. If you want to try lld yourself you have several options. Ideally, you’d be able to run update-alternatives --set ld /usr/bin/lld as root but that option is notably not available in Fedora. There was a proposal to make that work but it never materialized, so it cannot be made the default system-wide linker.

However, depending on the build system used by a particular project, there should be a way to make it use lld instead of /usr/bin/ld. For example, VK-GL-CTS uses CMake, which invokes the compiler to link executable files, instead of calling the linker directly, which would be unusual. Both GCC and Clang can be passed -fuse-ld=lld as a command line option to use lld instead of the default linker. That flag should be added to CMake’s CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS variable, either by reconfiguring an existing project with, for example, ccmake, or by adding the flag to the LDFLAGS environment variable before running CMake on a build directory for the first time.

Looking forward to start using the mold linker in the future and its multithreading capabilities. In the mean time, I’m very happy to have checked lld. It’s not that usual that a simple tooling change as this one gives me such a clear advantage.