gcc: Enable Link-Time Optimization for gcc >= 4.6

This patch adds Link-Time Optimization when building the fast target
using gcc >= 4.6, and adds a scons flag to disable it (-no-lto). No
check is performed to guarantee that the linker supports LTO and use
of the linker plugin, so the user has to ensure that binutils GNU ld
>= 2.21 or the gold linker is available. Typically, if gcc >= 4.6 is
available, the latter should not be a problem. Currently the LTO
option is only useful for gcc >= 4.6, due to the limited support on
clang and earlier versions of gcc. The intention is to also add
support for clang once the LTO integration matures.

The same number of jobs is used for the parallel phase of LTO as the
jobs specified on the scons command line, using the -flto=n flag that
was introduced with gcc 4.6. The gold linker also supports concurrent
and incremental linking, but this is not used at this point.

The compilation and linking time is increased by almost 50% on
average, although ARM seems to be particularly demanding with an
increase of almost 100%. Also beware when using this as gcc uses a
tremendous amount of memory and temp space in the process. You have
been warned.

After some careful consideration, and plenty discussions, the flag is
only added to the fast target, and the warning that was issued in an
earlier version of this patch is now removed. Similarly, the flag used
to enable LTO, now the default is to use it, and the flag has been
modified to disable LTO. The rationale behind this decision is that
opt is used for development, whereas fast is only used for long runs,
e.g. regressions or more elaborate experiments where the additional
compile and link time is amortized by a much larger run time.

When it comes to the return on investment, the regression seems to be
roughly 15% faster with LTO. For a bit more detail, I ran twolf on
ARM.fast, with three repeated runs, and they all finish within 42
minutes (+- 25 seconds) without LTO and 31 minutes (+- 25 seconds)
with LTO, i.e. LTO gives an impressive >25% speed-up for this case.

Without LTO (ARM.fast twolf)

real	42m37.632s
user	42m34.448s
sys	0m0.390s

real	41m51.793s
user	41m50.384s
sys	0m0.131s

real	41m45.491s
user	41m39.791s
sys	0m0.139s

With LTO (ARM.fast twolf)

real	30m33.588s
user	30m5.701s
sys	0m0.141s

real	31m27.791s
user	31m24.674s
sys	0m0.111s

real	31m25.500s
user	31m16.731s
sys	0m0.106s

1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/SConstruct b/SConstruct
index ee53be196..d2e6b1233 100755
--- a/SConstruct
+++ b/SConstruct
@@ -165,6 +165,8 @@ AddLocalOption('--default', dest='default', type='string', action='store',
                help='Override which build_opts file to use for defaults')
 AddLocalOption('--ignore-style', dest='ignore_style', action='store_true',
                help='Disable style checking hooks')
+AddLocalOption('--no-lto', dest='no_lto', action='store_true',
+               help='Disable Link-Time Optimization for fast')
 AddLocalOption('--update-ref', dest='update_ref', action='store_true',
                help='Update test reference outputs')
 AddLocalOption('--verbose', dest='verbose', action='store_true',
@@ -477,6 +479,10 @@ else:
     main['SHCXXCOMSTR']     = Transform("SHCXX")
 Export('MakeAction')
 
+# Initialize the Link-Time Optimization (LTO) flags
+main['LTO_CCFLAGS'] = []
+main['LTO_LDFLAGS'] = []
+
 CXX_version = readCommand([main['CXX'],'--version'], exception=False)
 CXX_V = readCommand([main['CXX'],'-V'], exception=False)
 
@@ -506,6 +512,24 @@ if main['GCC']:
     # http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html for details
     if compareVersions(gcc_version, '4.4') >= 0:
         main.Append(CXXFLAGS=['-std=c++0x'])
+
+    # LTO support is only really working properly from 4.6 and beyond
+    if compareVersions(gcc_version, '4.6') >= 0:
+        # Add the appropriate Link-Time Optimization (LTO) flags
+        # unless LTO is explicitly turned off. Note that these flags
+        # are only used by the fast target.
+        if not GetOption('no_lto'):
+            # Pass the LTO flag when compiling to produce GIMPLE
+            # output, we merely create the flags here and only append
+            # them later/
+            main['LTO_CCFLAGS'] = ['-flto=%d' % GetOption('num_jobs')]
+
+            # Use the same amount of jobs for LTO as we are running
+            # scons with, we hardcode the use of the linker plugin
+            # which requires either gold or GNU ld >= 2.21
+            main['LTO_LDFLAGS'] = ['-flto=%d' % GetOption('num_jobs'),
+                                   '-fuse-linker-plugin']
+
 elif main['ICC']:
     pass #Fix me... add warning flags once we clean up icc warnings
 elif main['SUNCC']: