[fpc-pascal] FReeBSD changing linker

[Marc Santhoff]

Hi,

some changes on FreeBSD 12 and up seem to affect FPC and Lazarus, see "Tasks"
list at the end of the quotation. Maybe it is of special interest to the dev
team.

Re-posting a part of FreeBSDs Quarterly Status Report Q1 2019:

"
LLVM's lld as the FreeBSD system linker

   Links
   LLD on the FreeBSD Wiki
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/LLD
   lld exp-run
    URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/214864

   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org>

   In FreeBSD-HEAD and 12.0 the default FreeBSD system linker (i.e.,
   /usr/bin/ld) is LLVM's lld, on amd64, arm64, and armv7. For i386 in
   12.0 lld is used as the bootstrap linker (i.e., to build the kernel and
   base system) but it is not enabled as the system linker because of
   multiple issues building FreeBSD ports with it enabled.

   The primary issue affecting i386 with lld is that many ports build
   position-dependent code (i.e., non-PIC) for use in shared libraries.
   This either comes from omitting the -fPIC compiler flag, or using
   hand-written position-dependent assembly. Compared with other CPU
   architectures i386 position-independent code is rather inefficient,
   which may be responsible for port authors making an explicit decision
   to avoid PIC.

   By default lld does not allow position-dependent code in shared objects
   (in particular, it does not permit relocations against read-only
   segments - typically containing the`.text` section).

   Over the last quarter many commits were made to the ports tree to fix
   the build when the system linker is lld - either building PIC code, or
   adding the -znotext linker flag to permit relocations against read-only
   segments, or just switching the port to link with GNU ld if it is
   incompatible with lld in some other way.

   At this point there are only a few dozen open bug reports for issues
   linking ports with lld as the system linker, and I expect FreeBSD 12.1
   to use lld as the system linker on i386 as well.

   Tasks:
     * Fix freepascal/Lazarus ports with lld
     * Triage and address remaining port failures
     * Holistic review of lld workarounds in the ports tree, to identify
       changes that are no longer needed, should be addressed in lld, or
       should be sent upstream

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
"

--
Marc Santhoff <M.Santhoff at web.de>