[mpich-devel] symbol visibility

[Kenneth Raffenetti]

Hi folks,

We are considering adding support for symbol visibility into MPICH. This 
is a standard shared library best-practice that reduces the exposed API, 
and leads to better performance by reducing the number of PLT branches 
for internal function calls. More on symbol visibility can be found 
here: 
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Exported-Symbols-of-Shared-Libraries.html.

I wanted to get the patches in front of a wider audience so folks are 
aware of what we are doing and can comment. You can find the current 
implementation here: 
http://git.mpich.org/mpich-dev.git/shortlog/refs/heads/visibility. 
Thanks to Intel for pointing out the need for this, and an initial 
version of the patch.

We believe this will have no impact on the MPICH ABI, and will test 
thoroughly once the patches land in master.

Let us know what you think.

Ken