TL&DR

make LLVM=1 LLVM_IAS=1

Enabling the clang LTO functionality in the kernel

My daily driving kernel is the HEAD of mainline built with CC=clang since I became aware of this being possible some point in the middle of 2020. Having seen the clang lto stuff land, I decided to attempt to consume it and squandered time unecessarily cluing myself up from first principles instead of reading the damn documentation.

I had historically been using:

make CC=clang HOSTCC=clang

this needed to become

make LLVM=1 LLVM_IAS=1

in order for the clang lto options to be populated in menuconfig.

This is well covered in the kernel llvm docs when you eventually find them. Google did not actually bring them to bare until I stubbed my toe on the page in the tree.

Having changed my make calls as indicated above, I could enable:

+# CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR is not set
+CONFIG_LTO=y
+CONFIG_LTO_CLANG=y
+CONFIG_ARCH_SUPPORTS_LTO_CLANG=y
+CONFIG_ARCH_SUPPORTS_LTO_CLANG_THIN=y
+CONFIG_HAS_LTO_CLANG=y
+# CONFIG_LTO_NONE is not set
+CONFIG_LTO_CLANG_FULL=y
+# CONFIG_LTO_CLANG_THIN is not set

and it compiled out the can and booted to a functional system, generating a kernel package 4megs smaller than the one it replaced.

Because I was enabling this in my pkgbuild personal kernel recipe, and because I overzealously enabled -OZ at the same time, I was missattributing my woes to the clang LTO pathway; the fine peeps on ClangBuiltLinux pointed out that I was almost certainly being boned by upstream build failure, and now I roll with:

build() {
  set -o nounset
  set -o pipefail
  set -o errexit
  #set -o xtrace

  cd $_kernel_src_dir && git clean -xdf

  if [[ -n ${_config_preset} ]]; then
    echo ${_make_cmd} ${_config_preset}
    ${_make_cmd} ${_config_preset}
  elif [[ -n ${_config_file} ]]; then
    cp ${_config_file} ${_kernel_src_dir}/.config
  else
    echo "Kernel not configured; bailing"
    exit 1
  fi

  ${_make_cmd} all 2>&1 | tee ${log_path}

  if [ -n "${_pi_ver}" ]; then
    ${_make_cmd} dtbs 2>&1 | tee -a ${log_path}
  fi

  set +o nounset
  set +o pipefail
  set +o errexit
}

In order to cease sausage production at the loss of the first employee to the mangler.