[PATCH,RFC,V3 0/5] Support for CTF in GCC

[Indu Bhagat]

On 07/04/2019 03:43 AM, Richard Biener wrote:
>> Hmm...a GCC plugin for CTF generation at compile-time may work out for a single
>> compilation unit.  But I am not sure how will LTO be supported in that case.
>> Basically, for LTO and -gtLEVEL to work together, I need the lto-wrapper to be
>> aware of the presence of .ctf sections (so I think). I will need to combine the
>> .ctf sections from multiple compilation units into a CTF archive, which the
>> linker can then de-duplicate.
> True.  lto-wrapper does this kind of dancing for the much more complex set of
> DWARF sections already.
>
>> Even if I assume that the technical hurdle in the above paragraph is solvable
>> within the purview of a plugin, I fear worse problems of adoption, maintenance
>> and distribution in the long run, if CTF support unfortunately ever remains to be
>> done via a plugin for reasons unforeseen.
>>
>> Going the plugin route for the short term, will continue to suffer similar
>> problems of distribution and support.
>>
>> - Is the plugin infrastructure supported on most platforms ? Also, I see that
>>     the plugin infrastructure supports all gcc versions from 4.5 onwards.
>>     Can someone confirm ? ( We minimally want the toolchain support with
>>     GCC 4.8.5 and GCC 8 and later, for now. )
> The infrastructure is quite old but you'd need new invocation hooks so this
> won't help.
>

OK then.  I will continue to focus on my current implementation without
exploring the plugin option at this time.  Thanks for confirming.

Indu