[LLVMdev] FYI: Planning to remove ProfileInfo and related passes from LLVM

[Alastair Murray]

Hi Alok,

On 16/07/12 12:41, #ALOK PRAKASH# wrote:
> I have been using the Profile.pl and the related passes and
> optimizations for about 4 years now. With every new release lately, the
> support for the profile scripts and their framework seemed to be
> downgrading. Hence, I used my own tiny one line fixes to keep them
> working. I offered to send these small patches to keep these scripts
> working, to the LLVM dev so that others can use it if they want. I think
> my email got lost that time, in the sea of emails we see on the dev mail
> list.

profile.pl has seen a non-cleanup related commit in 5 years ...  It 
seems so simple I'm not sure I see a need for it.  But clearly you use it!

> I must confess that I was not aware of the BPI and BFI infrastructures.
> The breaking of the profiling infrastructure always baffled me. Now it
> makes sense, since it has been superseded by these new frameworks.
>
> Anyway, if you guys decide to keep the old profiling framework, it would
> be good. As Alastair has mentioned, the llvm-prof helps in a way for
> instrumenting the code with the profile data. Maybe this is also part of
> the BPI/BFI in which case it's great.

If a new profiler loader based on BPI gets written then llvm-prof could 
be rewritten to use the BFI system without too much difficulty.

I found llvm-prof useful for examining the behaviour of profiling 
support within LLVM, but I'm curious about what you use it for.  It 
seems quite limited for performance analysis.

Regards,
Alastair.