Sylvestre's blog

Following a thread on the Clang mailing list, I did a quick analysis of the optimization flags used to build C or C++ code.

I used a rebuild result from last mid July of all Debian native packages (meaning that I don't have the log of full Java, Python or other packages without native code) and wrote a small script to count all their occurrences.
By default, deb packages uses the command "dpkg-buildflags --get CFLAGS" which will set the optimization level to -O2. However, many packages and upstream build systems do not respect such flags.

On 10320 binary-only packages (in total, Debian has around 19000), the results are the following:

Optimization level	Number of occurrences	Number of packages
-O	35597	269
-Os	30849	145
-O0	13993	294
-O1	25494	809
-O2	995803	7685
-O3	106048	531
-O4	1402	16
-O5
-O6	6935	49

Since a graphic talks more than numbers (note that the Y axis is logarithmic):

Disclaimer:
Some packages are using several optimization flags during the same build.
Some packages are not showing the full command line (see jessie release goal: verbose build logs)
The results might be approximate since I am basically grepping "-OX " on the log files.

The LLVM toolchain version 3.3 has been released a couple months ago.
Here are now the result of the rebuild of Debian archive using this version of the compiler.
Like the previous releases, we are at a bit less than 12% of packages failing (2188 packages on a total of 18854).
More warnings / errors detections have been added to the software (for example: like this defect of the C++ standard or the detection of unused linker option) causing more build failures, but, in the mean time, we fixed some issues in the Debian packages...

As usual, the following image shows clearly the evolution of the build failures over time.

As stated in my blog post for the release 3.2, this rebuilds prove that Clang is ready for production in term of support of the C, C++ and Objective C languages.

With the performance results showed by Chandler Carruth from Google at the last Euro LLVM summit (see this video from 5:40), I believe that it is now time to report and fix the bugs in the upstream packages.

I also presented this work (video) at the Debconf 13 last week in Vaumarcus (Switzerland) and I will be also presenting this work at the Linux Plumbers Conference, New Orleans.

With Léo Cavaille (as part of his GSOC) and Paul Tagliamonte, we are also working on providing a better automatic rebuild infrastructure for clang-built packages (and other static analyzers). More in the next few weeks.

Finally, I would like to thank folks at AWS for the Debian credit and David Suarez for helping on with the Ruby segfaults.

While raw videos of the previous Debconf are available on:
http://video.debian.net/

We, at IRILL, are glad to provide a nice HTML5 interface (and flash if HTML5 videos are not available) to browse all the videos of Debconf 13:
http://www.irill.org/videos/debconf13

Debian France and Debian Swiss associations are now selling products at Debconf.

We are now selling

Buff		23 CHF / 18 euros
Black polo		31 CHF / 25 euros
Rugby polo		50 CHF / 40 euros
Mousepad		13 CHF / 10 euros

We have also some new hoodies.
They come in 4 colors: black, white, grey and dark blue.
With or without zip:

Without zip: 44 CHF / 35 euros
With zip: 50 CHF / 40 euros

With also have hats:

Price: 10 CHF / 9 euros

We have also the Debian umbrellas and knifes.

Photo credit Kibi

For those who are at Debconf, they are for sell at the Debconf front desk from 4 to 6 and will be probably available for sell on enventelibre after the event.

As announcement on debian-devel-announce, I just uploaded java-common version 0.49. This version changes the default version of OpenJDK to version 7.

That means that packages depending on default-jdk/default-jre will be now built with OpenJDK 7 (instead of the 6) and also that the java/javac commands will be providing Java 7.
I also used the opportunity of this upload to update the Java policy.