llvm dev - Jul 2012 - [LLVMdev] FYI: Planning to remove ProfileInfo and related passes from LLVM

Hi Alok,

On 16/07/12 12:41, #ALOK PRAKASH# wrote:
> I have been using the Profile.pl and the related passes and
> optimizations for about 4 years now. With every new release lately, the
> support for the profile scripts and their framework seemed to be
> downgrading. Hence, I used my own tiny one line fixes to keep them
> working. I offered to send these small patches to keep these scripts
> working, to the LLVM dev so that others can use it if they want. I think
> my email got lost that time, in the sea of emails we see on the dev mail
> list.
profile.pl has seen a non-cleanup related commit in 5 years ...  It 
seems so simple I'm not sure I see a need for it.  But clearly you use it!
> I must confess that I was not aware of the BPI and BFI infrastructures.
> The breaking of the profiling infrastructure always baffled me. Now it
> makes sense, since it has been superseded by these new frameworks.
>
> Anyway, if you guys decide to keep the old profiling framework, it would
> be good. As Alastair has mentioned, the llvm-prof helps in a way for
> instrumenting the code with the profile data. Maybe this is also part of
> the BPI/BFI in which case it's great.
If a new profiler loader based on BPI gets written then llvm-prof could 
be rewritten to use the BFI system without too much difficulty.

I found llvm-prof useful for examining the behaviour of profiling 
support within LLVM, but I'm curious about what you use it for.  It 
seems quite limited for performance analysis.

Regards,
Alastair.

Hello Alastair,

Yeah like I said, I was not aware of the new profile framework being developed.
Interestingly BPI and BFI didnt turn up in any searches either. Anyway, I will
take a look at them and see how they differ from the existing tools.

Profile.pl is understandably a very simple script, but it does make it easier to
see some preliminary profile results and identity the hot portions of a program
which are suitable for hardware acceleration. llvm-prof also helps in the same
way.

Cheers,
Alok
________________________________________
From: Alastair Murray [alastairmurray42 at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, 16 July, 2012 9:47:54 PM
To: #ALOK PRAKASH#
Cc: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] FYI: Planning to remove ProfileInfo and related passes
from LLVM

Hi Alok,

On 16/07/12 12:41, #ALOK PRAKASH# wrote:
> I have been using the Profile.pl and the related passes and
> optimizations for about 4 years now. With every new release lately, the
> support for the profile scripts and their framework seemed to be
> downgrading. Hence, I used my own tiny one line fixes to keep them
> working. I offered to send these small patches to keep these scripts
> working, to the LLVM dev so that others can use it if they want. I think
> my email got lost that time, in the sea of emails we see on the dev mail
> list.
profile.pl has seen a non-cleanup related commit in 5 years ...  It
seems so simple I'm not sure I see a need for it.  But clearly you use it!
> I must confess that I was not aware of the BPI and BFI infrastructures.
> The breaking of the profiling infrastructure always baffled me. Now it
> makes sense, since it has been superseded by these new frameworks.
>
> Anyway, if you guys decide to keep the old profiling framework, it would
> be good. As Alastair has mentioned, the llvm-prof helps in a way for
> instrumenting the code with the profile data. Maybe this is also part of
> the BPI/BFI in which case it's great.
If a new profiler loader based on BPI gets written then llvm-prof could
be rewritten to use the BFI system without too much difficulty.

I found llvm-prof useful for examining the behaviour of profiling
support within LLVM, but I'm curious about what you use it for.  It
seems quite limited for performance analysis.

Regards,
Alastair.

Hi Alok,

On 17/07/12 13:00, #ALOK PRAKASH# wrote:
> Profile.pl is understandably a very simple script, but it does make
> it easier to see some preliminary profile results and identity the
> hot portions of a program which are suitable for hardware
> acceleration. llvm-prof also helps in the same way.
Ok, great -- using llvm-prof for detecting hot portions is the obvious 
use, but I just wanted to check.

I'll keep llvm-prof in mind when writing the new loader and update 
llvm-prof to use it.  I also don't have an issue with profile.pl so I 
can update it as required, it is tiny after all.  I'm not sure if others 
want it sticking around though.

Regards,
Alastair.