[LLVMdev] What are the optimizations that gold uses during the final link stage?

Rafael Espindola espindola at google.com
Tue Aug 31 09:54:41 PDT 2010


On 19 August 2010 01:25, Guoliang Jin <jingl1345 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Hi,
>
> I am using gold plugin with the option "-use-gold-plugin
> -Wl,-plugin-opt=also-emit-llvm" to compile apache.
>
> I objdumped the final executable httpd to httpd.S.
>
> I also compiled those per file bytecode into native code using the
> following:
> llc filename.o
> llvm-gcc -c filename.o.s -o filename.o.o
>
> Then I objdumped filename.o.o to filename.o.S and compared some
> functions between httpd.S. and filename.o.S, and I found the order of
> some instructions are different.
>
> Is this the expected behavior, probably because of some optimization
> during the final link stage? If this is the case, can you point me what
> those optimizations are, so that I could also apply them while compiling
> per file bytecode to native code.
>
> Or am I using the wrong way to compile per file bytecode to native code?

Gold uses the libLTO interface. I think there is a small bug (strange
design?) in libLTO: lto_codegen_write_merged_modules will write the
bitcode files after they are merged and internalized, but before other
optimizations are run. We should probably change that or add a new
function to libLTO that gives us access to the optimized code.

Can someone more familiar with libLTO comment why write_merged_modules
writes the IL before it is optimized?

> Thanks,
> Guoliang
>

Cheers,
-- 
Rafael Ávila de Espíndola




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