Developers Keep Striving To Build The Linux Kernel With LLVM Clang
Behan Webster is talking today at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley about the project itself plus the latest achievements. If you're a Phoronix reader, you've likely read about this initiative already at least a dozen times on the site about building Linux with Clang. The effort has been ongoing for several years now and while they're running the latest Clang compiler, there's still outstanding kernel patches needed to build outside of the GNU Compiler Collection.
Besides wanting to build the Linux kernel under Clang for faster compiler times and potentially faster performance of the resulting kernel, they remain interested in using Clang's powerful static analysis tools on the kernel, having various kernel checkers, and other benefits of this BSD-licensed compiler stack.
Some of the recent accomplishments for the project include:
- Besides testing the latest mainline Git, they are also beginning to test the latest linux-next code under Clang to see the direction the kernel is moving with the next kernel release cycle with regard to Clang compiler compatibility.
- They are also looking at compiling the Android Linux kernel with Clang (besides the Android user-space too).
- Supporting Linaro's LLVM work is also now a goal of the project.
- Roughly 48 kernel patches are needed still against the kernel code-base for different architectures for Clang to generate a complete, working build. Of the patches, 16 are needed for all architectures, 12 needed for ARM, ten needed for AArch64 ARM 64-bit, and ten needed for Intel 64-bit x86_64.
- All LLVMLinux patches are upstream in LLVM and Clang (and have been for some time now) so using the latest version of the compiler is fine without modifications.
Those wishing to learn more about the project can checkout the PDF slides and visit llvm.linuxfoundation.org. I'll have more updates after the actual presentation today where I'll be in attendance.
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