Well, my friend, have I got news for you! Introducing ThinLTO cache pruning policies a simple yet effective way to help your Linux machine shed some pounds and run like a cheetah.

To start: what is LTO (Link Time Optimization) and why do we need it? In short, LTO is a compilation technique that optimizes code at link time instead of during runtime. This can result in significant performance improvements for large applications or libraries with complex control flow graphs. However, the downside is that LTO generates intermediate object files (OBJs), which can take up a lot of disk space and slow down subsequent builds due to I/O overhead.

Enter ThinLTO cache pruning policies a set of rules designed to reduce the size of these OBJs by selectively discarding unnecessary optimizations or data structures. This not only saves precious disk space but also speeds up build times, as less data needs to be read and written from/to disk during compilation.

So how do we enable ThinLTO cache pruning policies in Linux? It’s actually pretty simple just add the following line to your CFLAGS or LDFLAGS environment variables:

# Set environment variable CFLAGS to enable ThinLTO cache pruning policies
export CFLAGS="-fthin-lto-strip-dead-symbols"

# Set environment variable LDFLAGS to enable ThinLTO cache pruning policies
# and print memory usage during compilation
export LDFLAGS="-Wl,--gc-sections,-Wl,--print-memory-usage -flto=thin"

The first flag (-fthin-lto-strip-dead-symbols) tells the compiler to remove any unused symbols from the intermediate OBJs. This can significantly reduce their size and improve build times. The second flag (-Wl,–gc-sections,-Wl,–print-memory-usage -flto=thin) is a bit more complex but essentially instructs the linker to perform various optimizations such as removing unused sections or functions, printing memory usage statistics, and using ThinLTO for faster compilation.

Of course, there are some caveats to be aware of when enabling ThinLTO cache pruning policies namely that not all compilers support this feature yet (GCC 10+ is required), and that certain optimizations may result in slightly slower runtime performance due to the additional overhead of discarding unnecessary data structures. However, for most use cases, these trade-offs are well worth it given the significant benefits in terms of disk space savings and faster build times.

Give ThinLTO cache pruning policies a try today and see for yourself how much lighter, leaner, and meaner your machine can be.