[llvm-dev] Default compression level for -compress-debug-info=zlib?
Fāng-ruì Sòng via llvm-dev
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Thu Aug 2 17:12:35 PDT 2018
For the record, GNU linkers that implement --compress-debug-sections=
ld.bfd bfd/compress.c uses Z_DEFAULT_COMPRESSION (6)
gold gold/compressed_output.c 1 if -O0 (default), 9 if -O1 or higher
-O2 in LLD enables other optimizations (currently just tail string
optimization). It may be better to use a different knob to represent
compression level if we ever want to tune this.
lld/ELF/OutputSections.cpp delegates to zlib::compress in
lib/Support/Compression.cpp, which specifies compression level 6 by
default. Not it has other two users in InstrProf.cpp (BEST_SIZE) and
ASTWriter (default).
zlib does not support parallelized compression. Switching to other
libraries might not be acceptable.
Another parallelism is to compress multiple debug sections simultaneously
(sorting debug sections by size and parallelize compressing them, e.g.
.debug_info .debug_ranges). But this could increase memory usage
dramatically.
For each debug section, a compression buffer of compressBound(sourceLen)
bytes has to allocated first. zlib's compressBound is a theoretical
maximum which is larger than sourceLen and can increase memory usage
a lot, though usually only a small portion of the buffer is actually
used.
On 2018-08-02, Simon Whittaker via llvm-dev wrote:
>Not really, as well as some sensitivity to the input data overall performance
>of the link with compression will depend on how this is implemented in lld -
>how is it parallelized? How is it chunked? Is it effectively pipelined with
>IO?
>
>Or, I wouldn't feel comfortable being able to make a recommendation to our
>end-users on whether to use this option or not based on my existing extensive
>benchmarking of zlib in isolation. It's necessary to test in real conditions.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Simon
>
>On Thu, 2 Aug 2018, 15:22 Rui Ueyama, <ruiu at google.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 2:05 PM Simon Whittaker <simon.f.whittaker at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
> > As to (3), in most cases, I believe it is rare to distribute
> executables with debug info widely
> > I think it is at least less important than (1).
>
> Agreed.
>
> > I think (1) is definitely the case, and that's also true for a
> distributed build system with which a lot of object files are copied
> between machines.
> > My suggestion was to use compression level 9 when both -O2 and
> -compress-debug-section=zlib are specified.
>
> Ok great, I'm less concerned if it still requires an explicit
> -compress-debug-section=zlib even with -O2 (I thought you were
> proposing to add to O2)
>
> Still for informational / advisory purposes it would be good for us to
> produce link time vs compression level vs total exe size, ideally with
> a couple of different storage types (at least PCIe SSD vs spinning) and
> CPUs.
>
> Debug sections are compresssed using zlib, so I think such benchmark would
> be testing the performance of zlib itself on various conditions.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Simon
>
> On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 1:17 PM, Rui Ueyama <ruiu at google.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 10:24 AM Simon Whittaker via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Rui,
>
> What's the intended advantage for compressing the debug
> sections? - (i) Improved link time through smaller IO / (ii)
> Improved Load / startup time for the debugger / (iii) Smaller
> exe with debug info for distribution / disk space?
>
> I think (1) is definitely the case, and that's also true for a
> distributed build system with which a lot of object files are
> copied between machines.
>
> I doubt (2) is true. Does compressing debug sections improve
> debugger load time? Of course, as you mentioned, it depends on the
> ratio of CPU speed and IO speed, but since linked debug info isn't
> as large as the total of input files, I think it is at least less
> important than (1).
>
> As to (3), in most cases, I believe it is rare to distribute
> executables with debug info widely. Only developers need debug
> info.
>
>
> For i) and ii) how much this is worth it depends on balance of
> storage bandwidth to compression (i) / decompression (ii)
> bandwidth. For spinning drives it *might* be a win but for SATA
> and especially PCIe / NVMe SSD it could be a CPU bottleneck?
> Though we should also bear in mind that compression can be
> pipelined with writes in i) and debug info loading could be
> lazy in ii)
>
> (e.g. for highly compressible data we've generally seen ~10MiB/
> s output bandwidth on single thread i7 @3.2GHz memory to memory
> for zlib9 with 32KiB window, that doesn't stack up well against
> modern IO)
>
> How is the compression implemented in lld? Is it chunked and
> therefore paralellizable (and able to be pipelined with IO) or
> more serial?
>
> I think the intention is i) so we'd be happy to link a few of
> our game titles with varying compression levels vs storage
> types and let you know the results. Might be a couple of
> weeks...
>
> > I wonder what is the best compression level when -O2 is
> passed to lld.
>
> Just to check, if the default is changed to compress at -O2
> we'll still be able to override to disable compression with
> -compress-debug-section=none ?
>
> My suggestion was to use compression level 9 when both -O2 and
> -compress-debug-section=zlib are specified.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Simon
>
> On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 7:00 AM, via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> More data on different compression levels will be good. In
> this case we're compressing fairly consistent looking input
> data (a DWARF section) so I think we stand a good chance of
> being able to pick a very reasonable level.
>
> I cringe at the thought of yet another user-facing knob,
> though.
>
> --paulr
>
>
>
> From: llvm-dev [mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org] On
> Behalf Of James Henderson via llvm-dev
> Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2018 6:32 AM
> To: Pavel Labath
> Cc: LLVM Dev
> Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] Default compression level for
> -compress-debug-info=zlib?
>
>
>
> Also not an expert, but would it make sense for this to be
> configurable at a fine-grained level, perhaps with another
> option, or an extension to the compress-debug-sections
> switch interface? That way users who care about the finer
> details can configure it themselves. And we should pick
> sensible options for the default.
>
>
>
> James
>
>
>
> On 2 August 2018 at 11:08, Pavel Labath via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> I don't claim to be an expert, but I did some zlib
> compression
> benchmarks in the past. IIRC, my conclusion from that was
> that the
> "DEFAULT" zlib level (6) is indeed a very good default for
> a lot of
> cases -- it does not generate much larger outputs, while
> being
> significantly faster than the max level. This all depends
> on the data
> set and what you intend to do with the resulting data, of
> course, but
> I guess my point is you don't have to choose only between 1
> and 9. I
> think it would be interesting to at least get the data for
> the default
> level before making choice.
>
> cheers,
> pl
>
> On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 at 01:57, Rui Ueyama via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> > Folks,
> >
> > I'd like to get expert's opinion on which compression
> level is suitable for lld's -compress-debug-section=zlib
> option, which let the linker compress .debug_* sections
> using zlib.
> >
> > Currently, lld uses compression level 9 which produces
> the smallest output in exchange for a longer link time. My
> question is, is this what people actually want? We didn't
> consciously choose compression level 9. That was just the
> default compression level for zlib::compress function.
> >
> > For an experiment, I created a patch to use compression
> level 1 instead of 9 and linked clang using that modified
> lld. By default, lld takes 1m4s to link clang with
> --compress-debug-sections=zlib. With that patch, it took
> only 31s.
> >
> > Here is a comparison of clang executable size with
> various configurations:
> >
> > no debug sections: 275 MB
> > level 9 compression: 855 MB
> > level 1 compression: 922 MB
> > no compression: 2044 MB
> >
> > Given that the best compression takes significantly
> longer time than the fastest compression, we probably
> should change the default to level 1. Any objections?
> >
> > I wonder what is the best compression level when -O2 is
> passed to lld. We could use level 9 when -O2 is passed, but
> is there any reason to compress debug sections that hard in
> the first place?
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > LLVM Developers mailing list
> > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> > http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
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