GSoC idea - porting and patching of userland for lld, the LLVM linker

[Jonathon McDaniels]

Hey guys,

After giving it some thought, I was thinking of porting ( as in, make it 
a port of ) and patching the userland so a make buildworld can go 
through on x86/AMD64 on lld, the LLVM linker, and if time permits, 
patching the kernel to make use of it.. As the binutils included in base 
is over 7 years old, and is unlikely to be updated due to the GPLv3, it 
would make sense to assist with removing dependence of the FreeBSD 
platforms now using LLVM/Clang for compiling.

Before I go contact the mentors that would be within the scope of this 
project, I wanted to make sure of the following:

  * That this would be a good use of GSoC
  * That it is narrow enough in scope to be feasible, but broad enough
    that it would prove a beneficial project.

Considering the environment we have now, I think it would allow me to 
further my knowledge of C beyond what I already know ( currently working 
on learning about dynamic linking of libraries, and I already know about 
data structures, stacks, pointers etc. and plan to be much farther along 
by the time of the start of the project and deliverables. ).

And since lld is compatible with the BSD license terms, and is 
interoperable with LLVM, it seems a viable and good project to undertake.

Thoughts from you guys?

Thanks,

Jonathon "Johnny" McDaniels