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On Jul 16, 2020, at 11:04 AM, David Major <dmajor@mozilla.com> wrote:

This sounds a lot like https://bugs.llvm.org/show\_bug.cgi?id=45050.

I'm glad to hear you figured out the root cause, thank you!

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 1:55 PM Min-Yih Hsu via llvm-dev <llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org> wrote:

Hi All,

Recently we discovered a (hidden) performance bug that happened when you’re using Full LTO setup + BFD linker to compile first-stage PGO executables that were expected to generate IR level profile files. That is, compiling an executable using following commands:

\`\`\`

clang -flto -fprofile-generate -c sample.c -o sample.c.bc.o

clang -flto sample.c.bc.o -o sample\_exe -fprofile-generate

\`\`\`

The resulting sample\_exe executable will always emit Frontend level profile files despite the presence of the -fprofile-generate flag, which should make the executable generate IR level profile files. Other prerequisites to reproduce this problem including:

• Using (latest version of) BFD linker

• Using LLVM’s own LTO linker plugin (i.e. LLVMgold.so)

• Using LLVM’s compiler-rt as the runtime library

• On a Linux / BSD platform

This problem has been confirmed not to happen with gold and LLD linkers. Impacts on usages on Windows platform remain unknown.

I just cooked a patch for this bug: https://reviews.llvm.org/D83967

Basically the solution (and the root cause) is similar to this patch several years ago: https://reviews.llvm.org/D34797

The intriguing (or annoying) part of this bug is that you’ll never find the issue (since it neither crashes nor causes significant performance regression) unless you take a look into the generated profile files. So I just want to put a heads up here, though I know most of the folks here are moving away from using BFD linkers.

Best,

-Min

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