At Least 27% Of Gentoo's Portage Can Be Easily LTO Optimized For Better Performance

GentooLTO is a configuration overlay for Gentoo's overlay to make it easy to enable Link Time Optimizations (LTO) and other compiler optimizations for enabling better performance out of the Gentoo packages. GentooLTO appears to be inspired in part by the likes of Clear Linux who employ LTO and other compiler optimization techniques like AutoFDO for yielding better performance than what is conventionally shipped by Linux distributions. The GentooLTO developers and users have wrapped up their survey looking at how practical this overlay configuration is on the massive Portage collection.

The initial GentooLTO survey has been going on since last October and they have collected data from more than 30 users. The survey found that of the Gentoo Portage 18,765 packages as of writing, at least 5,146 of them are working with the GentooLTO configuration.

While they survey is user-driven and not systematically testing all available packages, at least from the current numbers they are looking at a minimum of 27% of Gentoo portage working nicely with link-time optimizations without any workarounds, but the total number of working packages is likely quite higher.

They survey did not look at the performance differences from LTO optimizations on these packages. Those interested in the results can find the survey data here. Those wanting to look more at the GentooLTO project itself can find it on GitHub.