Well, I'm Back

About this time last year, I did some work to improve ld performance and reported it on this blog, getting to the point where I could link gklayout.so with debug symbols in only five seconds. Sadly at some point during my SUSE upgrades, things went downhill again: recently it's been taking about 70 seconds to link. Vlad says he's seen similar performance regressions with the ld in Fedora Core 5.

So I went to investigate, and the first thing I found is that the ld in binutils CVS HEAD only takes 10 seconds, i.e., it's seven times faster that the SUSE package. So my advice to other Linux developers is, if you feel that the packaged ld is sluggish, try building your own from CVS.