[distcc] Speed up linking

[Martin Pool]

On 31 Jan 2006, Ken Beal <kenbeal at gmail.com> wrote:
> One idea would be to send "partial link" requests to client machines, like
> sending two object files to a participating client, which then links them "as
> much as possible" and returns the resulting "combined OBJ".

Or, as a smaller step, you could just distribute whole link command
lines to a remote machine, allowing the client to get on with something
else.  This would only help for projects that link more than just one
big executable, and that can do it in parallel, but large project trees
may do this: either producing many libraries, or multiple executables.
It might also help for Gentoo.

Possibly the hardest part of this is working out which libraries will be
referenced by the linker, and (?) compensating for the library paths
getting bound into the output.  This probably needs to take into account
both the cc and ld behaviour, and so may vary across platforms in a
complex way.

I suspect the ratio of data size to CPU usage is higher for linking than
compilation, but since sending data is quite cheap it may still be OK.

-- 
Martin
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