[LLVMdev] RFC - A tool to convert profiles from external profilers

[Philip Reames]

On 07/16/2014 11:20 AM, Diego Novillo wrote:
>
> A few weeks ago, I announced the availability of a conversion tool 
> that converts Linux Perf sample profiles to LLVM's sample profiler 
> (https://github.com/google/autofdo).
This seems like a potentially useful tool.  I support having this in tree.
> I would like to support more than Linux Perf, eventually. So, I'm 
> thinking that I want to move the LLVM profile writer to 
> llvm/lib/ProfileData and only have the various readers under 
> llvm/tools/llvm-prof-converter. 
Given we now have multiple proposed users, having these libraries in 
some shared location seems reasonable.  I would want both the readers & 
writers in the same location.

Glancing at the current code in ProfileData, I do not see any uses in 
LLVM itself.  There is one checked-in use in the tools directory.   I'm 
hesitant about putting support code for tools which is not otherwise 
used in the main llvm source tree.  Is there a better place we could put 
this?  (Or am I simply being too conservative?)

We do need to make a clear distinction between externally defined 
formats (with test cases! and spec references!) and internally defined 
formats which can be changed.

Philip