[llvm-dev] RFC: Adding a code size analysis tool

[Jake Ehrlich via llvm-dev]

I have 3 issues with bloaty 1) It's designed with a "give all information
possible" philosophy not a "give only actionable information (preferably
with reasons)" 2) there is (currently) no way to restrict the information
you get to the allocated case 3) It hasn't been scaling well on hundreds of
binaries. Point 2 is easily fixable. Point 3 is most likely fixable and the
features to drive bloaty exist I suppose currently we're driving individual
instances of bloaty ourselves and this is both faster and gives us more
information than we get using config files and csv files. Point 1 seems to
be a real killer and a major point this proposal seeks to address. If we
can work out a good proposal to add the functionality mentioned in point 1
I'd be happy to support that as well.

I think an external tool could do this just as well. My bias is for it to
be in llvm however because it makes it easier to distribute since we
already have testing, CI, a distribution figured out for that. That's not a
good technical reason I grant you.

On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 3:26 PM David Blaikie via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 3:24 PM JF Bastien <jfbastien at apple.com> wrote:
>
>> On Oct 1, 2018, at 3:16 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> (my vote, somewhat biased - is that I'd love to see more investment in
>> Bloaty (to keep all these sort of size analysis tools and tricks in one
>> place), but sort of accept folks are probably going to keep building more
>> infrastructure for this sort of thing in LLVM directly)
>>
>>
>> I get where that comes from, but it seems a bit like a Valgrind versus
>> sanitizer argument: integrating with the toolchain gives you things you
>> can’t really get otherwise. Valgrind is still great as a self-standing
>> thing.
>>
>
> Not sure that's quite the same though - with sanitizer integrating with
> the optimizers is the key here.
>
> With bloaty - it could, at worst, use LLVM's libDebugInfo as a library to
> implement the more advanced debug-using features without being less
> functional than an in-LLVM implementation.
>
> - Dave
>
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 12:03 PM Vedant Kumar <vsk at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I worked on a code size analysis tool for a 'week of code' project and
>>> think
>>> that it might be useful enough to upstream.
>>>
>>> The tool is inspired by bloaty (https://github.com/google/bloaty), but
>>> tries to
>>> do more to attribute code size in actionable ways.
>>>
>>> For example, it can calculate how many bytes inlined instances of a
>>> function
>>> added to a binary. In its diff mode, it can show how much more
>>> aggressively a
>>> function was inlined compared to a baseline. This can be useful when
>>> you're,
>>> say, trying to figure out why firmware compiled by a new compiler is
>>> just a few
>>> bytes over the size limit imposed by your embedded device :). In this
>>> case,
>>> extra information about inlining can help inform a decision to either
>>> tweak the
>>> inliner's cost model or to judiciously add a few `noinline` attributes.
>>> (Note
>>> that if you're willing to recompile & write a few SQL queries,
>>> optimization
>>> remarks can give you similar information, albeit at the IR level.)
>>>
>>> As another example, this code size tool can attribute code size to
>>> semantically
>>> interesting groups of code, like C++/Swift classes, or files. In the
>>> diff mode,
>>> you can see how the code size of a class/file grew compared to a
>>> baseline. The
>>> tool understands inheritance, so you can also see interesting high-level
>>> trends.
>>> E.g `clang::Sema` grew more than `llvm::Pass` between clang-6 and
>>> clang-7.
>>>
>>> Unlike bloaty, this tool focuses exclusively on the text segment. Also
>>> unlike
>>> bloaty, it uses LLVM's DWARF parser instead of rolling its own. The tool
>>> is
>>> currently implemented as a sub-tool of llvm-dwarfdump.
>>>
>>> To get size information about a program, you do:
>>>
>>>   llvm-dwarfdump size-info -baseline <object> -stats-dir <dir>
>>>
>>> This emits four *.stats files into <dir>, each containing a distinct
>>> 'view' into
>>> the code groups in <object>. There's a file view, a function view, a
>>> class view,
>>> and an inlining view. Each view is sorted by code size, so you can see
>>> the
>>> largest functions/classes/etc immediately.
>>>
>>> The *.stats files are just human-readable text files. As it happens,
>>> they use
>>> the flamegraph format (http://brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html). This
>>> makes it
>>> easy to visualize any view as a flamegraph. (If you haven't seen one
>>> before,
>>> it's a hierarchical visualization where the width of each entry
>>> corresponds to
>>> its frequency (or in this case size).)
>>>
>>> To look at code growth between two programs, you'd do:
>>>
>>>   llvm-dwarfdump size-info -baseline <object> -target <object>
>>> -stats-dir <dir>
>>>
>>> Similarly, this emits four 'view' files into <dir>, but with a
>>> *.diffstats
>>> suffix. The format is the same.
>>>
>>> Pending Work
>>> ------------
>>>
>>> I think the main piece of work the tool needs is better testing.
>>> Currently
>>> there's just a single end-to-end test in clang. It might be better to
>>> check in
>>> a few binaries so we can check that the tool reports sizes correctly.
>>>
>>> Also, it may turn out that folks are interested in different ways of
>>> visualizing
>>> size data. While the textual format of flamegraphs is really convenient
>>> for
>>> humans to read, the graphs themselves do make more sense when the
>>> underlying
>>> data have a frequentist interpretation. If there's enough interest I can
>>> explore
>>> using an alternative format for visualization, e.g:
>>>
>>>   http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/bloat/
>>>   https://github.com/evmar/webtreemap
>>>
>>> (Thanks JF for pointing these out!)
>>>
>>> Here's a link to the source code:
>>>
>>>   https://github.com/vedantk/llvm-project/tree/sizeinfo
>>>
>>> Selected Examples
>>> -----------------
>>>
>>> Here are a few interesting snippets from a comparison of clang-6 vs.
>>> clang-7.
>>>
>>> First, let's take a look at the function view diffstat. Here are the 10
>>> functions which grew in size the most. On the left hand side, you'll see
>>> the
>>> demangled function name. The *change* in code size in bytes is reported
>>> on the
>>> right hand side (only positive changes are reported).
>>>
>>>   clang::Sema::CheckHexagonBuiltinCpu([snip]) [function] 170316
>>>   ProcessDeclAttribute([snip]) [function] 125893
>>>   llvm::AArch64InstPrinter::printAliasInstr([snip]) [function] 105133
>>>   llvm::AArch64AppleInstPrinter::printAliasInstr([snip]) [function]
>>> 105133
>>>   ParseCodeGenArgs([snip]) [function] 64692
>>>   unswitchNontrivialInvariants([snip]) [function] 40180
>>>   getAttrKind([snip]) [function] 35811
>>>   clang::DumpCompilerOptionsAction::ExecuteAction() [function] 32417
>>>   llvm::UpgradeIntrinsicCall([snip]) [function] 30239
>>>   bool llvm::InstructionSelector::executeMatchTable<(anonymous
>>> namespace)::ARMInstructionSelector const, [snip]) const [function] 29352
>>>
>>>
>>> Next, let's look at the file view diffstat. This can be useful because
>>> it goes
>>> beyond simply identifying the files which grew the most. It actually
>>> describes
>>> which *functions* grew the most in those files, creating more
>>> opportunites to
>>> do something about the code growth.
>>>
>>>   lib/Target/X86/X86ISelLowering.cpp
>>> [file];combineX86ShuffleChain([snip]) [function] 24864
>>>   lib/Target/X86/X86ISelLowering.cpp [file];combineMul([snip])
>>> [function] 14907
>>>   lib/Target/X86/X86ISelLowering.cpp [file];combineStore([snip])
>>> [function] 12220
>>>   ...
>>>   tools/clang/lib/Sema/SemaExpr.cpp
>>> [file];clang::Sema::CheckCompareOperands([snip]) [function] 16024
>>>   tools/clang/lib/Sema/SemaExpr.cpp
>>> [file];diagnoseTautologicalComparison([snip]) [function] 1740
>>>   tools/clang/lib/Sema/SemaExpr.cpp
>>> [file];clang::Sema::ActOnNumericConstant([snip]) [function] 1436
>>>   tools/clang/lib/Sema/SemaExpr.cpp
>>> [file];checkThreeWayNarrowingConversion([snip]) [function] 1356
>>>   tools/clang/lib/Sema/SemaExpr.cpp
>>> [file];CheckIdentityFieldAssignment([snip]) [function] 1280
>>>
>>>
>>> The class view diffstat is a bit different because it has more levels of
>>> nesting than the other views, due to inheritance. This might help give a
>>> sense
>>> for the high-level changes in a program, but may also be less actionable.
>>>
>>>   clang::Sema [class];clang::Sema::CheckHexagonBuiltinCpu([snip])
>>> [function] 170316
>>>   clang::Sema [class];clang::Sema::CheckHexagonBuiltinArgument([snip])
>>> [function] 24156
>>>   clang::Sema [class];clang::Sema::ActOnTag([snip]) [function] 22373
>>>   ...
>>>   llvm::AArch64InstPrinter [class];llvm::AArch64AppleInstPrinter
>>> [class];llvm::AArch64AppleInstPrinter::printAliasInstr([snip]) [function]
>>> 105133
>>>   llvm::AArch64InstPrinter [class];llvm::AArch64AppleInstPrinter
>>> [class];llvm::AArch64AppleInstPrinter::printInstruction([snip]) [function]
>>> 5824
>>>   ...
>>>   llvm::Pass [class];llvm::FunctionPass
>>> [class];llvm::MachineFunctionPass
>>> [class];(anon)::X86SpeculativeLoadHardeningPass [class];(anonymous
>>> namespace)::X86SpeculativeLoadHardeningPass::checkAllLoads(llvm::MachineFunction&)
>>> [function] 19287
>>>   ...
>>>   llvm::Pass [class];llvm::FunctionPass
>>> [class];llvm::MachineFunctionPass [class];(anon)::MachineLICMBase
>>> [class];(anonymous
>>> namespace)::MachineLICMBase::runOnMachineFunction(llvm::MachineFunction&)
>>> [function] 20343
>>>
>>> Here's a link to a flamegraph of the class view diffstat (warning: it's
>>> big):
>>>
>>>
>>> http://net.vedantk.com/static/llvm/swift-clang-4.2-vs-5.0.class-view.diffstats.svg
>>>
>>> Finally, here are a few interesting entries from the inlining view
>>> diffstat. As
>>> with all of the other views, the right hand side still shows code growth
>>> in
>>> bytes. For a given inlining target, this size is computed by diffing the
>>> sum of
>>> PC range lengths from all DW_TAG_inlined_subroutines referring to that
>>> target.
>>> This allows the size tool to attribute code size to an inlining target
>>> even
>>> when the inlined code is not contiguous in the caller.
>>>
>>>   llvm::raw_ostream::operator<<(char const*) [inlining-target] 66720
>>>   llvm::MCRegisterClass::contains(unsigned int) const [inlining-target]
>>> 64161
>>>   llvm::StringRef::StringRef(char const*) [inlining-target] 39262
>>>   llvm::MCInst::getOperand(unsigned int) const [inlining-target] 33268
>>>   clang::CodeCompletionResult::~CodeCompletionResult() [inlining-target]
>>> 25763
>>>   llvm::operator+(llvm::Twine const&, llvm::Twine const&)
>>> [inlining-target] 25525
>>>   clang::ASTImporter::Import(clang::SourceLocation) [inlining-target]
>>> 21096
>>>   clang::Sema::Diag(clang::SourceLocation, unsigned int)
>>> [inlining-target] 20898
>>>
>>> Feedback & questions welcome!
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>> vedant
>>>
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