GSoC idea - porting and patching of userland for lld, the LLVM linker

[Brooks Davis]

On Fri, Mar 06, 2015 at 01:20:07PM -0500, Jonathon McDaniels wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> After giving it some thought, I was thinking of porting ( as in, make it 
> a port of ) and patching the userland so a make buildworld can go 
> through on x86/AMD64 on lld, the LLVM linker, and if time permits, 
> patching the kernel to make use of it.. As the binutils included in base 
> is over 7 years old, and is unlikely to be updated due to the GPLv3, it 
> would make sense to assist with removing dependence of the FreeBSD 
> platforms now using LLVM/Clang for compiling.
> 
> Before I go contact the mentors that would be within the scope of this 
> project, I wanted to make sure of the following:
> 
>   * That this would be a good use of GSoC
>   * That it is narrow enough in scope to be feasible, but broad enough
>     that it would prove a beneficial project.
> 
> Considering the environment we have now, I think it would allow me to 
> further my knowledge of C beyond what I already know ( currently working 
> on learning about dynamic linking of libraries, and I already know about 
> data structures, stacks, pointers etc. and plan to be much farther along 
> by the time of the start of the project and deliverables. ).
> 
> And since lld is compatible with the BSD license terms, and is 
> interoperable with LLVM, it seems a viable and good project to undertake.
> 
> Thoughts from you guys?

Not to be too discouraging, I want lld in the base soon, but I'm not
convinced there's a good GSoC project here.  Creating a port of lld is
probably a week's work even starting with no knowledge of the ports
system.  There may be some FreeBSD specific changes to lld required,
but they should be small.

Resolving compatibility issues with FreeBSD and ports might be a good
project, but being able to work on that depends on the completion of
linker script support.  I think that's an unacceptably large external
dependency for a GSoC project given that there's no public timeline for
that work.

-- Brooks
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