[LLVMdev] Adding sample profile support to llvm-profdata?

[Justin Bogner]

Diego Novillo <dnovillo at google.com> writes:
> Duncan, Justin,
>
> I'm about to submit a series of patches that add writing capabilities for
> sample profiles in both text and binary formats. Soon, I'll add a third format
> (to make it interoperable with GCC).
>
> I would like to add some profile maintenance utilities as well: merging,
> dumping and converting.
>
> It seems like the best place would be tools/llvm-profdata. But that means that
> I need to have a way of distinguishing sample from instrumented profiles.
>
> For the binary formats, it's easy to have the tool check the magic bits at the
> start, but for the text format it is not easy to tell whether we're dealing
> with a sample profile vs an instrumented profile.
>
> The options I see are:
>
> 1- Add a --profile-type={sample|instr} to llvm-profdata to specify whether we
> are dealing with a sample or an instrumented profile. This would help prevent
> mixing and matching the two types of profiles (they are not convertible one to
> the other, not easily anyway).
>
> 2- Write a totally separate tool to deal with sample profiles.

There's also:

3- Make the text formats distinguishable. The text based instrprof
   format is really only used for testing, so I don't care too much if
   we make it require something distinguishable in the first line.

> I am slightly in favour of option #1. I could even make --profile-type=instr
> to avoid having a flag day for tools you may have deployed.

I also prefer #1 to #2. If we do that, I think the flag should be
required if the input can't be autodetected (ie, for any text format),
but optional for the binary formats.