kbuild: support LLVM=1 to switch the default tools to Clang/LLVM

As Documentation/kbuild/llvm.rst implies, building the kernel with a
full set of LLVM tools gets very verbose and unwieldy.

Provide a single switch LLVM=1 to use Clang and LLVM tools instead
of GCC and Binutils. You can pass it from the command line or as an
environment variable.

Please note LLVM=1 does not turn on the integrated assembler. You need
to pass LLVM_IAS=1 to use it. When the upstream kernel is ready for the
integrated assembler, I think we can make it default.

We discussed what we need, and we agreed to go with a simple boolean
flag that switches both target and host tools:

  https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/3/28/494
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/4/3/43

Some items discussed, but not adopted:

- LLVM_DIR

  When multiple versions of LLVM are installed, I just thought supporting
  LLVM_DIR=/path/to/my/llvm/bin/ might be useful.

  CC      = $(LLVM_DIR)clang
  LD      = $(LLVM_DIR)ld.lld
    ...

  However, we can handle this by modifying PATH. So, we decided to not do
  this.

- LLVM_SUFFIX

  Some distributions (e.g. Debian) package specific versions of LLVM with
  naming conventions that use the version as a suffix.

  CC      = clang$(LLVM_SUFFIX)
  LD      = ld.lld(LLVM_SUFFIX)
    ...

  will allow a user to pass LLVM_SUFFIX=-11 to use clang-11 etc.,
  but the suffixed versions in /usr/bin/ are symlinks to binaries in
  /usr/lib/llvm-#/bin/, so this can also be handled by PATH.

Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Nathan Chancellor <natechancellor@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Nathan Chancellor <natechancellor@gmail.com> # build
Tested-by: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst b/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst
index 510f38d7e78a..2d1fc03d346e 100644
--- a/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst
+++ b/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.rst
@@ -262,3 +262,8 @@ KBUILD_BUILD_USER, KBUILD_BUILD_HOST
 These two variables allow to override the user@host string displayed during
 boot and in /proc/version. The default value is the output of the commands
 whoami and host, respectively.
+
+LLVM
+----
+If this variable is set to 1, Kbuild will use Clang and LLVM utilities instead
+of GCC and GNU binutils to build the kernel.