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LLD: The new new ELF linker

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LLD: The new new ELF linker
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LLD: A new linker for FreeBSD
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42
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CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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The default linker shipped with FreeBSD base system (the last GPLv2 version of GNU ld) is showing its age. Lack of LTO, missing support for newer architectures (e.g. AArch64) and poor performances are increasing problems over time. As a supporting evidence of this thesis, DragonflyBSD recently switched from GNU ld 2.7 to gold (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release44/). FreeBSD ships with external toolchain support for those architectures which support is missing but this has maintainability problems. This talk explores LLD, a new BSD-licensed linker developed as part of the LLVM project. LLD is thought to be fast (early test show it being at least on par with gold while linking LLVM itself) and quasi-compatible with GNU ld. We take a look at the history and overall design of LLD and propose a path to integrate it in FreeBSD-11.