OpenSUSE Enables LTO By Default For Tumbleweed - Smaller & Faster Binaries

The past few months openSUSE developers have been working on enabling LTO by default for its packages while now finally with the newest release of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed this goal has been accomplished.

As of today, the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed release is using Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by default. For end-users this should mean faster -- and smaller -- binaries thanks to the additional optimizations performed at link-time. Link-time optimizations allow for different optimizations to be performed at link-time for the different bits comprising a single module/binary for the entire program. Sadly not many Linux distributions are yet LTO'ing their entire package set besides the aggressive ones like Clear Linux.

Testing by their developers are proving successful though they are prepared for the possibility of some early fall-out by enabling GCC LTO across their distribution. LTO'ed Chromium and PGO'ed Firefox (Profile Guided Optimizations) are also expected.

More details on opensuse-factory.

Major kudos to openSUSE for achieving LTO'ed state. I'll be working on getting out some fresh benchmarks shortly though some pre/post-optimized packages may be more of a challenge as I hadn't prepared any recent pre-tests for this rolling-release distribution, but should make for some interesting Leap comparison and against other Linux distributions.