We are pleased to announce that the Toolchains and Kernel Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. Toolchains are the main part of any development, as they create the executables from the code a developer writes. In order to run efficiently on the operating system, there needs to be a strong understanding of the interface between the application and the kernel it runs on. This microconference is focused on the integration of toolchains and the Linux kernel.
Since last year’s meet up, the following has been accomplished:
- Linux-toolchains mailing list and archive created.
- Rust-for-linux Github org established. Patches move from out of tree module building, to in tree module building.
- CI for kernel builds with LLVM moved to tuxbuild after an unexpected “no more free lunch” from TravisCI.
- LTO support landed in mainline.
- PGO patches sent upstream.
- At least one bugfix sent found via clang-tidy/clang-analyzer, discussions around driving tree wide cleanups via clang-tidy.
- GCC implemented support for asm goto with outputs
- Support for auto-initialized automatics in GCC is being worked out in GCC upstream. This is one of the security features that were deemed as desirable by the kernel last year. Work on the other missing desired security features is WIP.
This year’s topics to be discussed include:
- Upstreaming Rust Support
- Using Clang’s locking annotations
- Memory ordering progress in the C/C++ standards committees
- Toolchain security feature requests
- Post Link Optimization of the kernel with Binary Optimization and Layout Tool (BOLT)
- Objtool on arm64[4]
- DWARF, CTF and BTF
- BPF/BTF/CORE support in the GNU Toolchain
- Using BTF for ABI analysis
Come and join us in the discussion of making the toolchains work better with the Linux kernel.
We hope to see you there.
