debug-info-for-profiling

Introduction

Automatic Feedback Directed Optimization (AFDO) is a method for using sampling based profiles to guide optimizations. This is contrasted with other methods of FDO or profile-guided optimization (PGO) which use instrumented profiling.

Unlike PGO (controlled by the rustc flags -Cprofile-generate and -Cprofile-use), a binary being profiled does not perform significantly worse, and thus it's possible to profile binaries used in real workflows and not necessary to construct artificial workflows.

Use

In order to use AFDO, the target platform must be Linux running on an x86_64 architecture with the performance profiler perf available. In addition, the external tool create_llvm_prof from this repository must be used.

Given a Rust file main.rs, we can produce an optimized binary as follows:

rustc -O -Zdebug-info-for-profiling main.rs -o main
perf record -b ./main
create_llvm_prof --binary=main --out=code.prof
rustc -O -Zprofile-sample-use=code.prof main.rs -o main2

The perf command produces a profile perf.data, which is then used by the create_llvm_prof command to create code.prof. This final profile is then used by rustc to guide optimizations in producing the binary main2.