The FreeBSD 64-bit Base System Can Now Be Linked Using LLD

LLVM's LLD linker has been making a lot of progress over the past year and now it's hit the milestone of being able to link the entire FreeBSD/amd64 base system.

FreeBSD developers have been looking to use LLD as their system linker, following their move a while back now of using LLVM/Clang in place of GCC.

As of last week, one of the developers working on this project was able to link the entire FreeBSD/amd64 base system with user-space world and kernel using LLD. Those wishing to learn more can do so via this bug report.

Perhaps by FreeBSD 12.0 we'll see them migrate to the LLD linker by default. As covered in the earlier article about LLD's progress, this LLVM linker remains much faster than GNU Gold and alternatives. The code-base is arguably cleaner, more modern, and other benefits.