"Dave Korn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > The main place where threading may make sense, especially > > with LTO, is the linker. This is a longer lived task, and > > is the last step of compilation, where no other parellel > > processes are active. Moreover, linking tends to be I/O > > intensive, so a number of threads will likely be blocked > > for I/O. > > I'm not really sure how this would play with SMP (as opposed to threading). > I don't see why you think threading could be particularly useful in the > linker? It's the pipeline of compiler optimisation passes that looks like an > obvious candidate for threading to me.
It's irrelevant to the main discussion here, but in fact there is a fair amount of possible threading in the linker proper, quite apart from LTO. The linker spends a lot of time reading large files, and the I/O wait can be parallelized. And the linker spends a reasonable amount of time computing relocations, which can be parallelized such that the relocations for each input file are computed independently. Ian
