cpu/cortexm_common: enable LTO by default

[benpicco]

Contribution description

LTO support in GCC should be pretty mature by now, to a point where Fedora enables it by default for it's packages.

Let's follow suit by enabling LTO for our Cortex-M target.
This is the most mature target and is well-tested regularly.
So if any issues are caused by this, they should pop up fairly quick.

Testing procedure

Usually one would expect interrupt-related things to break if there are LTO related bugs.
Testing everything on every platform is not practicable.
But if no errors pop up during release-spec testing, this is probably fine.

Issues/PRs references

[maribu]

There is still one issue to overcome: We currently use gcc for linking even when LLVM is used as toolchain. This does not work with LTO.

[benpicco]

Looks like tests/devfs is indeed broken with LTO.

[maribu]

@kaspar030: You were recently asking for examples of LTO increasing the ROM size. The output of Murdock has some :-/

-- running on worker mobi6.inet.haw-hamburg.de thread 1, build number 28617.
make: Entering directory '/tmp/dwq.0.8873865931215175/c6e60fae10124650099702b3fa584256/bootloaders/riotboot'
Building application "riotboot" for "cc2538dk" with MCU "cc2538".

/opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2019-q4-major/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-none-eabi/9.2.1/../../../../arm-none-eabi/bin/ld: /tmp/dwq.0.8873865931215175/c6e60fae10124650099702b3fa584256/build/riotboot.elf section `.text' will not fit in region `rom'
/opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2019-q4-major/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-none-eabi/9.2.1/../../../../arm-none-eabi/bin/ld: region `rom' overflowed by 856 bytes
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
/tmp/dwq.0.8873865931215175/c6e60fae10124650099702b3fa584256/bootloaders/riotboot/../..//Makefile.include:610: recipe for target '/tmp/dwq.0.8873865931215175/c6e60fae10124650099702b3fa584256/build/riotboot.elf' failed
make: *** [/tmp/dwq.0.8873865931215175/c6e60fae10124650099702b3fa584256/build/riotboot.elf] Error 1
make: Leaving directory '/tmp/dwq.0.8873865931215175/c6e60fae10124650099702b3fa584256/bootloaders/riotboot'
cat: /tmp/dwq.0.8873865931215175/c6e60fae10124650099702b3fa584256/build/test-input-hash.sha1: No such file or directory
-- build directory size: 1000K

I don't know if the increase of ROM size only affects riotboot, or if the increase in ROM size for other apps just does not result in link failures.

I can reproduce the increase also with my GCC toolchain (+552B .text, +4B .bss, +-0B .data). Previously my experience with LTO were that I consistently got smaller binaries, but sometimes a missing __attribute__((used)) resulted in IRQ handlers being garbage collected or similar issues.

[kaspar030]

I don't know if the increase of ROM size only affects riotboot, or if the increase in ROM size for other apps just does not result in link failures.

tests/minimal also gets significantly larger:

   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   3668       8     988    4664    1238 /home/kaspar/src/riot.tmp/tests/minimal/bin/samr21-xpro/tests_minimal.elf

   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   2312       8     988    3308     cec /home/kaspar/src/riot.tmp/tests/minimal/bin/samr21-xpro/tests_minimal.elf

[kaspar030]

I wonder if we graph this, if there's a constant overhead, pointing to something not properly LTO'ed.

[kaspar030]

hello-world also gets larger on samr21-xpro, and that definitely wasn't the case before.

[kaspar030]

I bisected this, 81cb769 adds almost 2k to hello-world on samr21-xpro compiled with LTO.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. If you want me to ignore this issue, please mark it with the "State: don't stale" label. Thank you for your contributions.

[crasbe]

Superseded by #22338.

[mguetschow]

I don't know if the increase of ROM size only affects riotboot, or if the increase in ROM size for other apps just does not result in link failures.

tests/minimal also gets significantly larger:

   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   3668       8     988    4664    1238 /home/kaspar/src/riot.tmp/tests/minimal/bin/samr21-xpro/tests_minimal.elf

   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   2312       8     988    3308     cec /home/kaspar/src/riot.tmp/tests/minimal/bin/samr21-xpro/tests_minimal.elf

For reference, this is not true anymore in 2026:

$ BUILD_IN_DOCKER=1 make -C tests/minimal BOARD=samr21-xpro all -j
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   2296       8     988    3292     cdc /data/riotbuild/riotbase/tests/minimal/bin/samr21-xpro/tests_minimal.elf

$ BUILD_IN_DOCKER=1 LTO=1 make -C tests/minimal BOARD=samr21-xpro all -j
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   1736       0     988    2724     aa4 /data/riotbuild/riotbase/tests/minimal/bin/samr21-xpro/tests_minimal.elf