596024 - Link with gold on Android

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

Gold should be able to reduce the library size.

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Does gold ship with the NDK, or would we be building our own? Either way, this sounds more like a RelEng bug.

Comment 2

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

This bug is to investigate how to do it before handing it off to releng.

Comment 3

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

Figured out how to do it but the code size win isn't too significant. Took about a megabyte off libxul.

Comment 4

[Kyle Huey (Exited; not receiving bugmail, old account, do not use)]

That sounds significant to me!  How big is libxul on android?

Comment 5

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

About 16mb. Shaving 1mb is worthwhile but it's not enough to really affect user perception of the fennec size.

Comment 6

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

Reduces the size of the apk by a bit less than 220kb.

Comment 7

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

Not working on this now.

Comment 8

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Note that stripping 1MB off libxul.so is 1MB less to uncompress during startup. Considering uncompressing libxul.so alone takes around 500ms on a nexus S...

Comment 9

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

I think this is fixed now that we have upgraded to Android NDK r8c (bug 816993), which uses gold by default.