This flag is specific to clang, where it is only used by the 32-bit and
64-bit ARM backends. In certain situations, the presence of this flag
will cause a warning, as shown by commit 6580c5c18fb3 ("um: clang: Strip
out -mno-global-merge from USER_CFLAGS").

Since commit 61163efae020 ("kbuild: LLVMLinux: Add Kbuild support for
building kernel with Clang") that added this flag back in 2014, there
have been quite a few changes to the GlobalMerge pass in LLVM. Building
several different ARCH=arm and ARCH=arm64 configurations with LLVM 11
(minimum) and 15 (current main version) with this flag removed (i.e.,
with the default of '-mglobal-merge') reveals no modpost warnings, so it
is likely that the issue noted in the comment is no longer relevant due
to changes in LLVM or modpost, meaning this flag can be removed.

If any new warnings show up that are a result of the removal of this
flag, it can be added back under arch/arm{,64}/Makefile to avoid
warnings on other architectures.

Signed-off-by: Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>
Tested-by: David Gow <davidgow@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Tested-by: Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>

Pull Kbuild updates from Masahiro Yamada:

 - Add new environment variables, USERCFLAGS and USERLDFLAGS to allow
   additional flags to be passed to user-space programs.

 - Fix missing fflush() bugs in Kconfig and fixdep

 - Fix a minor bug in the comment format of the .config file

 - Make kallsyms ignore llvm's local labels, .L*

 - Fix UAPI compile-test for cross-compiling with Clang

 - Extend the LLVM= syntax to support LLVM=<suffix> form for using a
   particular version of LLVm, and LLVM=<prefix> form for using custom
   LLVM in a particular directory path.

 - Clean up Makefiles

* tag 'kbuild-v5.18-v2' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/masahiroy/linux-kbuild:
  kbuild: Make $(LLVM) more flexible
  kbuild: add --target to correctly cross-compile UAPI headers with Clang
  fixdep: use fflush() and ferror() to ensure successful write to files
  arch: syscalls: simplify uapi/kapi directory creation
  usr/include: replace extra-y with always-y
  certs: simplify empty certs creation in certs/Makefile
  certs: include certs/signing_key.x509 unconditionally
  kallsyms: ignore all local labels prefixed by '.L'
  kconfig: fix missing '# end of' for empty menu
  kconfig: add fflush() before ferror() check
  kbuild: replace $(if A,A,B) with $(or A,B)
  kbuild: Add environment variables for userprogs flags
  kbuild: unify cmd_copy and cmd_shipped