2016-07-18 - Allan McRae

Inspired by discussions on the arch-general mailing list, test-sec-flags was created by pid1 (with help from anthraxx, strcat, sangy, and rgacogne) to test the performance impact of various security-oriented compilation and linking flags. The goal is to determine if these flags can be the new default for all Arch Linux packages. Preliminary results suggest that the performance impact is almost nonexistent compare to the compilation flags we already use, but we would like to collect and compare more results before moving forwards.

Download the source here and see the README for installation and usage instructions. The results subdirectory contains instructions on how to pull out the relevant statistics from the result files.

We are collecting results in the test-sec-flags wiki on Github. Please add your results there. In particular, we would very much like i686 results, as all of the previous contributors have been on x86_64 devices.

Patches welcome.