Automatic PGO - Initial implementation (1/N)

[Evan Cheng]

On Sep 26, 2013, at 4:55 AM, Diego Novillo <dnovillo at google.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 8:54 PM, Evan Cheng <evan.cheng at apple.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hmm. Scalar transformation seems *wrong* but you are right it can't an analysis pass. A couple of ideas:
>> 
>> 1. Can we implement it not as a pass but a utility that clients can use?
>> 2. Move it to lib/Transform/Instrumentation?
> 
> One hard requirement for this feature is to be enabled as a regular
> compiler option. Users are expecting this interface:
> 
> $ clang -O2 -fauto-profile foo.cc -o foo
> 
> (the actual name of the flag is irrelevant, of course)
> 
> I am not sure what you mean by utility in the context of LLVM. Can I
> implement utilities so that the above interface works?

$ clang -O2 -fauto-profile foo.cc -o foo

What does this do? Is it annotating the IR for one source file? Or is this producing an annotated executable? If it's the former, then I see your point.


>  Similarly for
> the instrumentation case.  This pass does not generate instrumentation
> code, but it does generate IR metadata.
>  If we want to consider that a
> form of instrumentation, and we can keep the user interface, then I
> don't really mind where it ends up in.

I don't really have a strong opinion. It just seems a bit off to call this a scalar transformation pass since that term usually means some kind of optimization pass.

Evan

> 
> 
> Diego.