* Add support for the BOLT post-link binary optimizer
Using [bolt](https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/bolt)
provides a fairly large speedup without any code or functionality
changes. It provides roughly a 1% speedup on pyperformance, and a
4% improvement on the Pyston web macrobenchmarks.
It is gated behind an `--enable-bolt` configure arg because not all
toolchains and environments are supported. It has been tested on a
Linux x86_64 toolchain, using llvm-bolt built from the LLVM 14.0.6
sources (their binary distribution of this version did not include bolt).
Compared to [a previous attempt](https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/issues/224),
this commit uses bolt's preferred "instrumentation" approach, as well as adds some non-PIE
flags which enable much better optimizations from bolt.
The effects of this change are a bit more dependent on CPU microarchitecture
than other changes, since it optimizes i-cache behavior which seems
to be a bit more variable between architectures. The 1%/4% numbers
were collected on an Intel Skylake CPU, and on an AMD Zen 3 CPU I
got a slightly larger speedup (2%/4%), and on a c6i.xlarge EC2 instance
I got a slightly lower speedup (1%/3%).
The low speedup on pyperformance is not entirely unexpected, because
BOLT improves i-cache behavior, and the benchmarks in the pyperformance
suite are small and tend to fit in i-cache.
This change uses the existing pgo profiling task (`python -m test --pgo`),
though I was able to measure about a 1% macrobenchmark improvement by
using the macrobenchmarks as the training task. I personally think that
both the PGO and BOLT tasks should be updated to use macrobenchmarks,
but for the sake of splitting up the work this PR uses the existing pgo task.
* Simplify the build flags
* Add a NEWS entry
* Update Makefile.pre.in
Co-authored-by: Dong-hee Na <donghee.na92@gmail.com>
* Update configure.ac
Co-authored-by: Dong-hee Na <donghee.na92@gmail.com>
* Add myself to ACKS
* Add docs
* Other review comments
* fix tab/space issue
* Make it more clear that --enable-bolt is experimental
* Add link to bolt's github page
Co-authored-by: Dong-hee Na <donghee.na92@gmail.com>
Remove the "configure --with-cxx-main" build option: it didn't work
for many years. Remove the MAINCC variable from configure and
Makefile.
The MAINCC variable was added by the issue gh-42471: commit
0f48d98b74. Previously, --with-cxx-main
was named --with-cxx.
Keep CXX and LDCXXSHARED variables, even if they are no longer used
by Python build system.
When Python is built with "./configure --enable-pystats" (if the
Py_STATS macro is defined), the _Py_GetSpecializationStats() function
must be exported, since it's used by the _opcode extension which is
built as a shared library.
- Remove ``--with-tclk-*`` options from `configure`
- Use pkg-config to detect `_tkinter` dependencies (Tcl/Tk, X11)
- Manual override via environment variables `TCLTK_CFLAGS` and `TCLTK_LIBS`
* Add also references to --with-trace-refs option.
* Move _ob_next and _ob_prev at the end, since they don't exist by
default and are related to debug.
Add Doc/using/configure.rst documentation to document configure,
preprocessor, compiler and linker options.
Add a new section about the "Python debug build".
Dong-hee Na
Kevin Modzelewski
Victor Stinner
Christian Heimes
Matthias Köppe
Gregory P. Smith
vainaijr
Dennis Sweeney
Erlend Egeberg Aasland
Mark Dickinson
Mark Shannon
Pablo Galindo
Inada Naoki
Christian Clauss
Jero Bado