GNU Arm Embedded ld with LTO support

flto has no effect on ld. It is a gcc option. If you print out the -v when you do

$ ./arm-none-eabi-gcc -O2 -flto  -specs=rdimon.specs foo.c -v --save-temps

You will see that the collect2 wrapper invokes the liblto_plugin.so  which then reads all the GIMPLE bytecode, invokes lto1 which then subsequently calls the compiler-proper(via the driver) for all the gimple optimization and eventually you have the binary output.

I would encourage you to have a look at the -v output if you want to go deeper into how the lto call sequence works. --save-temps will give you all the intermediate files generated.

flto has no effect on ld. It is a gcc option. If you print out the -v when you do

$ ./arm-none-eabi-gcc -O2 -flto  -specs=rdimon.specs foo.c -v --save-temps

You will see that the collect2 wrapper invokes the liblto_plugin.so  which then reads all the GIMPLE bytecode, invokes lto1 which then subsequently calls the compiler-proper(via the driver) for all the gimple optimization and eventually you have the binary output.

I would encourage you to have a look at the -v output if you want to go deeper into how the lto call sequence works. --save-temps will give you all the intermediate files generated.