[cfe-dev] [LLVMdev] RFC: Indirect Call Target Profiling

[Kostya Serebryany]

<slightly off topic>
Indirect Call Target Profiling can be used for other purposes as well, for
example to provide feedback to fuzzers.
I've recently committed a very simple patch to AddressSanitizer that adds
indirect call instrumentation specifically for this purpose.
(llvm part: http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project?rev=220699&view=rev,
compiler-rt part coming soon).
If this or similar proposal gets implemented in clang I'd love to see two
things:
  - extreme performance of instrumented code (instrument_indirect_call_site
needs to be very fast, lock-free and, ideally contention-free)
  - command-line utility that can dump the indir call coverage data in
human- and scrip- readable format.
</slightly off topic>

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 11:28 AM, <betulb at codeaurora.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> We've been working on adding indirect call target profiling support to the
> instrumented profiler for PGO purposes. I’d like to propose the following
> design.
>
> Goal: Our aim is to add instrumentation around indirect call sites, so
> that the run-time can track the callee addresses and their access
> frequencies. From the addresses we’d like to infer the callee names and
> use it in optimizations to improve the performance of applications which
> make heavy use of indirect calls. Spec is a candidate benchmark that gives
> us applications both written in C and C++ and makes use of indirect calls.
> Spec can prove the effectiveness of optimizations making use of this
> additional data.
>
> Design:
> To determine the function names from the profiled target addresses, we've
> extended the data variable that is built by build_data_var() in
> CodeGenPGO.cpp (abbr. PFDV: Per Function Data Variable) to save the
> function addresses. PFDV is communicated to the run-time during function
> registration and outputted in the raw profile data file. This data
> structure is also extended to contain the number of indirect call sites
> for each function.
>
> To help communicate the target addresses to run-time, we insert a call to
> a run-time routine before each indirect call site in clang. Something
> like:
>
> void instrument_indirect_call_site(uint8_t *TargetAddress, void *Data,
> uint32_t CounterIndex);
>
> This run-time function takes in the target address, the index/id of the
> indirect call site and the pointer to the profile data variable of the
> caller (i.e. PFDV). The runtime routine checks if the target address has
> been seen before for the indirect call site index/id or not. If not, then
> an entry is added into an internal data structure. If yes, the counter
> associated with the target address is incremented by 1. This counter
> records the number of times the target address is called.
>
> Raw profile data file stores the target addresses and the number of times
> any target address is taken per each call site index. llvm-profdata reads
> the function addresses from the raw profile data file, then compares them
> against the target addresses from the same file. Each match helps identify
> the function names for the recorded addresses.
>
> llvm-profdata processed files contain the target function names. In case
> no function matches the target address then the target address is
> converted to string and stored in that format in the “indexed” data files.
> On the PGO path, clang consumes the returned indirect target data and
> attaches the following metadata at the indirect call sites.
>
> !33 = metadata !{metadata !"indirect_call_targets", i64
> <total_exec_count>, metadata !"target_fn1”, i64 <target_fn1_count>,
> metadata !"target_fn2”, i64 <target_fn2_count>, ….}
>
> Only the top most called N function names are recorded at each indirect
> call site. “indirect_call_targets” is the string literal identifying the
> fields of this metadata. <total_exec_count> is a 64 bit value for the
> total number of times the indirect call is executed followed by the
> function names and execution counts of each target.
>
> We're working on collecting further data points on the overhead of this
> additional instrumentation on the original profiler. Looking forward to
> hearing your comments.
>
> Thanks,
> -Betul Buyukkurt
>
> Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc.
> The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of the Code Aurora Forum,
> a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
>
>
>
>
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