[Openembedded-architecture] [oe] [meta-browser] Chromium and gold linker

[Phil Blundell]

On Mon, 2017-07-10 at 18:07 -0400, Denys Dmytriyenko wrote:
> 
> It is not about being installed, but about being supported by the
> toolchain 
> in use - think of external toolchains not built by OE-Core... The
> original 
> question was whether it's appropriate to force gold linker in
> recipes, if 
> ld-is-gold is not set by the distro.
> 

My view on that would be that in general no, individual recipes should
not be forcing ld.gold on their own initiative.  Apart from anything
else, gold still does not support all the same architectures that the
BFD linker does, so there will be some targets where ld.gold simply
isn't available.  And as you say, the toolchain may simply not have
installed it.

Of course, if a particular recipe actually has a strong dependency on
gold (i.e. it won't work at all without it) then it would probably be
reasonable for it to do whatever it needs to.  But if we're talking
about simply preferring ld.gold over ld.bfd for performance reasons,
no, this is not something that individual recipes ought to be doing. 
They should simply invoke "ld" (or let gcc do that) and trust the
distro and/or toolchain to have installed an appropriate
implementation.

p.