The Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2015 Composer Editions for Windows* and Linux* have an internal implementation feature enhancement to the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor binary image created when using the Intel® Language Extensions for Offload (LEO) or OpenMP* 4.0 target constructs.
The enhancement enables the Intel® 15.0 compilers to create an Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) format executable binary file for Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor offload image. In previous releases, the compiler created an ELF format shared library (.so) binary file.
The ELF format executable binary file provides the application developer discovery and notification of undefined references within the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor offload executable binary file at link-time (a design aspect of the ELF executable binary file) instead of runtime (a design aspect of the shared library (.so) file). This enhancement circumvents the need for -Wl,-zdefs used in previous releases to enable notification of undefined references at link-time.
The enhancement further enables more optimizations within the coprocessor offload code region due to avoidance of symbol preemption on Linux.
On a related note, the tool for manipulating the Fat binary and object files is offload_extract. The Offload Extract tool is a standalone tool that extracts embedded target objects from fat objects and embedded target binaries and libraries from fat executables on Windows* and Linux* systems.
This feature enhancement is available in both the C++ and Fortran Intel® 15.0 compilers.