On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:18:47PM -0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I'm interested in applying for Google Summer of Code and wanted to work in > some project in the area of parallel/multi-core programming. Looking > through the GCC GSoC Wiki page I found a subject that sounds really > interesting to me in the "Speed Up" section: Multithreaded linker.
The linker has long been a bottleneck, but Ian Taylor has contributed a new ELF-only linker, "gold", which is more than five times faster than GNU ld (though for now it only works on x86 and x86-64). It reduces the CPU requirement so much that the task is pretty much completely I/O dominated, so the opportunity for speedup by multi-threading is greatly reduced. See http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2008-03/msg00162.html (and thanks, Ian!) The item you saw is in the "pie in the sky" category, meaning ideas that are taken less seriously. Also, the linker is part of GNU binutils, not GCC, so a project to speed up the linker wouldn't qualify as a GCC SoC project AFAIK. But anyone who wants to go over to binutils and help get gold running on more platforms would have my personal respect and thanks.
