[llvm-dev] getting nowhere with thinLTO

[Teresa Johnson via llvm-dev]

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 2:31 PM, Davis, Alan via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> I’m trying to incorporate thinLTO into our proprietary linker. I can’t
> seem to make it work at all (although I do have the ‘thick’ form working).
>

Sorry to hear that, hopefully we can help get that sorted out.


> When I try to invoke the ThinGenerator API it crashes somewhere way down
> in the bowels of IPO. So stepping away from the linker, I am just trying to
> explore the processing steps using standalone off-the shelf llvm built from
> tip-of-tree.
>

For a new implementation I would highly recommend using the new LTO API,
which utilizes linker resolution info and is better supported at this
point. See http://llvm-cs.pcc.me.uk/include/llvm/LTO/LTO.h#234.
See also gold-plugin.cpp and the lld sources - both utilize this API. To
test it use the llvm-lto2 tool instead of llvm-lto. Because this interface
uses linker resolution info, invoking via llvm-lto2 is more tedious since
resolutions must be specified for all symbols in the input files. See
invocations in the llvm tests for examples.


>
> 1. When I do ‘clang -c -flto=thin t1.c’ on a simple input file, the
> resulting .o file is a bitcode file as expected, but when I llvm-dis it
> there is no evidence of the module summary information. Is there a way to
> view the summary index for a given module?
>

Unfortunately not. This has come up a few times and the long-term plan is
to serialize it through llvm assembly, but no one has had the bandwidth to
completely flesh this out yet, and there was disagreement about what to do
in the short term, so nothing went in. For now, you have to use
llvm-bcanalyzer -dump, but that is a raw output format, although it will at
least allow you to confirm the summary sections are there.


>
> 2. When I take two or three .o files generated using -flto=thin and pass
> them to the standalone llvm-lto tool, as in:
>
>    llvm-lto --thinlto t2.o t3.o --exported-symbol=t2 -o index
>
> the combined index is (apparently) empty.
>

Use llvm-bcanalyzer -dump to see the contents of the output index. It
shouldn't be empty.

>
>
> 3. When I take a program and pass all the .o files to llvm-lto
> --thinlto-action=run, I get recompiled .o files for each but there seems to
> be no IPO (no inlining, etc).
>

How do you know? BTW you can invoke llvm-lto with the
-thinlto-save-temps=<pathprefix>
option to get bitcode files emitted from the backends after the major
phases of ThinLTO backend compilation. I.e. to see what was imported.
You can also pass internal llvm options to llvm-lto,
i.e. -debug-only=function-import will give you debug info from the function
importing done both during the thin link and during the thinlto backends.

Let me know what you find.

Teresa


>
>
> What am I missing?
>
>
>
> -Alan
>
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>


-- 
Teresa Johnson |  Software Engineer |  tejohnson at google.com |  408-460-2413
<(408)%20460-2413>
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