For those unfamiliar, lld is theLLVM linker, supporting PE/COFF, ELF, Mach-O, and WebAssembly ports.These object file formats differ significantly, and each port mustfollow the conventions of the platform's system linker. As a result, theports share limited code (diagnostics, memory allocation, etc) and havelargely separate reviewer groups.

With LLVM 22.1 releasing soon, I've added some notes to the https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/release/22.x/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.rstas an lld/ELF maintainer. As usual, I've reviewed almost all the patchesnot authored by me.

For the first time, I used an LLM agent (Claude Code) to help lookthrough commits(git log release/21.x..release/22.x -- lld/ELF) and draftthe release notes. Despite my request to only read lld/ELF changes,Claude Code also crafted notes for other ports, which I retained sincetheir release notes had been quite sparse for several releases.

• --print-gc-sections=<file> has been added toredirect garbage collection section listing to a file, avoidingcontamination of stdout with other linker output. (#159706)
• A VersionNode lexer state has been added for betterversion script parsing. This brings the lexer behavior closer to GNU ld.(#174530)
• Unversioned undefined symbols now use version index 0, aligning withGNU ld 2.46 behavior. (#168189)
• .data.rel.ro.hot and .data.rel.ro.unlikelyare now recognized as RELRO sections, allowing profile-guided staticdata partitioning. (#148920)
• DTLTO now supports archive members and bitcode members of thinarchives. (#157043)
• For DTLTO,--thinlto-remote-compiler-prepend-arg=<arg> has beenadded to prepend an argument to the remote compiler's command line. (#162456)
• Balanced Partitioning (BP) section ordering now skips input sectionswith null data, and filters out section symbols. (#149265) (#151685)
• For AArch64, fixed a crash when using--fix-cortex-a53-843419 with synthetic sections andimproved handling when patched code is far from the short jump. (#170495)
• For AArch64, added support for the R_AARCH64_FUNCINIT64dynamic relocation type for relocating word-sized data using the returnvalue of a function. (#156564)
• For AArch64, added support for the R_AARCH64_PATCHINSTrelocation type to support deactivation symbols. (#133534)
• For AArch64, added support for reading AArch64 Build Attributes andconverting them into GNU Properties. (#147970)
• For ARM, fixed incorrect veneer generation for wraparound branchesat the high end of the 32-bit address space branching to the low end.(#165263)
• For LoongArch, -r now synthesizesR_LARCH_ALIGN at input section start to preserve alignmentinformation. (#153935)
• For LoongArch, added relocation types for LA32R/LA32S. (#172618) (#176312)
• For RISC-V, added infrastructure for handling vendor-specificrelocations. (#159987)
• For RISC-V, added support for statically resolved vendor-specificrelocations. (#169273)
• For RISC-V, -r now synthesizesR_RISCV_ALIGN at input section start to preserve alignmentinformation during two-stage linking. (#151639)

Besides me, Peter Smith (smithp35) and Jessica Clarke (jrtc27) havedone a lot of reviews.

jrtc27 has done great work simplifying the dynamic relocation system,which is highly appreciated.

I should call out https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/172618: forthis relatively large addition, the author and approver are from thesame company and contributing to their architecture, and neither theauthor nor the approver is a regular lld contributor/reviewer. Theauthor did not request review from regular reviewers and landed thepatch just 3 minutes after their colleague's approval. I left a commentasking to keep the PR open for other maintainers to review.

Link: lld 21 ELFchanges