[llvm-dev] [RFC] BOLT: A Framework for Binary Analysis, Transformation, and Optimization

[Maksim Panchenko via llvm-dev]

Hi All,

 

Please find below an RFC for adding a binary optimization framework to LLVM.

 

Thanks for the feedback,

Maksim & BOLT Team

 

[RFC] BOLT: A Framework for Binary Analysis, Transformation, and Optimization

 

1. Background and Motivation

 

BOLT is a static post-link binary optimizer successfully used inside and outside of Facebook for code optimizations that complement traditional compiler whole-program and link-time optimizations [1]. Last year Google reported that BOLT accelerates their key workloads by 2% to 6% [2]. Additionally, BOLT is used in academia as a framework for program instrumentation, transformation, and binary analysis [3].

 

We believe that including BOLT in the LLVM project will benefit the community in several ways [4]. First, BOLT is useful as a binary optimizer. It has been used at Facebook to accelerate the top services, and we would love to see more people benefit from the performance boost that BOLT brings. We would also love to see our partners adopt BOLT's new use-cases, such as optimizing mobile and embedded applications. Beyond the binary optimizer, BOLT is an impressive infrastructure that enables research in the following areas:

• Advanced disassembly
• Low-level program instrumentation
• Static analysis

 

2. Overview

 

While BOLT uses several LLVM libraries [5], it is currently a separate project based on an out-of-tree version of LLVM [6]. Most of the code lives under separate tools/llvm-bolt directory, and required changes to LLVM are included in the supplied patch [7]. The patch mainly consists of backported fixes and minor extensions of the existing interfaces to update debug info, frame information, and ORC.

 

BOLT has no external build dependencies outside of LLVM. For profile collection, we recommend using sampling with a Linux perf tool [8]. LBR (last branch records) feature [9] is recommended as it improves profile quality dramatically. BOLT can be supplied perf.data profile directly, but in general, we advise converting the profile first using the supplied perf2bolt utility. In case the sampling profiling is unavailable, e.g., while running under a hypervisor locally or in the cloud, BOLT provides a builtin instrumentation.

 

BOLT supports x86-64 ELF as the primary platform. We have also implemented the initial support for Aarch64, and the support for MachO is in the works.

 

3. USE CASES

 

3.1 Link-time and binary transformations and optimizations

 

Static profile-driven post-link optimization of an application was our primary goal when creating BOLT. The convenience and expandability that the model offers perhaps could only be exceeded by a dynamic binary optimization approach. E.g., to optimize a binary using a perf-generated profile, the user has to execute a single command:

 

$ llvm-bolt a.out -data perf.data -o a.out.bolt <optimization opts>

 

No recompilation of a.out is needed (*), but we ask to link with "--emit-relocs" for maximum performance gains. However, the latter is not a strict requirement, and the command works even on stripped binaries.

 

We have worked on reducing BOLT processing time and memory consumption. Overall, BOLT efficiency has been improved by over 3X during that process. It takes less than a minute to optimize HHVM [10] production binary with over 100 MB of code and less than 3 minutes to optimize another multi-gigabyte production binary with 500 MB of code. BOLT memory consumption is under 5 GB for HHVM and under 13 GB for the large binary (**).

 

Fast turn-around times for optimizing an application with BOLT without the need for source code allow us to design a system that automatically manages binary profiling and optimization. This is one of the most exciting directions in application optimization we are currently pursuing.

 

We thought it would be interesting to perform a fresh comparison of BOLT overhead to Propeller [11]. Sadly, Propeller relies on a custom version of an external create-llvm-prof tool that we could not build in our setup, and using a GitHub-hosted binary version of that tool in the virtual environment produced a profile that caused a performance regression of the optimized application. Using "-fbasic-block-sections=all" Propeller option without a profile resulted in fast linking times but also caused a performance regression.

 

Although code reordering is the primary optimization in BOLT and the source of most performance gains, it is not the only optimization in BOLT. The full list of optimizations includes late inlining, indirect call promotion, frame optimizations, and others. The convenience of adding new optimizations in whole-program post-link mode is one of the main advantages that the BOLT framework offers, be it for research or practical purposes.

 

Additionally, BOLT can add new code to a linked ELF binary. We have recently used that capability to allocate frequently-executed code on huge pages automatically. Even legacy applications can now use 2MB pages for code on x86-64 Linux systems to reduce the number of iTLB misses.

 

BOLT's ability to process and optimize binary code without source code, such as legacy/distributed binaries, or code from third-party and assembly-written code, provides another advantage over a pure compiler-based approach. This advantage could or could not be important for optimizations depending on the user scenario. However, the visibility into the code mentioned above could be critical for other code re-writing cases such as vulnerability mitigations, instrumentation, and static analysis.

 

*) Support for input with split functions is in the works. Before it is completed, we ask not to use "-freorder-blocks-and-partition" compiler option during the build. A similar or better result will be achieved by running the BOLT function splitting pass.

 

**) while running BOLT with "-reorder-blocks=cache+ -reorder-functions=hfsort -split-functions=1 -split-eh" optimization options. DWARF update takes extra time and memory.

 

3.2 Advanced Disassembly

 

Internally, BOLT identifies code in the binary, breaks it into functions, disassembles, and uses static analysis to build a control flow graph. This functionality could complement a traditional disassembler, as it adds the ability to display possible targets for indirect jumps/calls, providing a better understanding of the control flow in a function.

 

Additionally, for performance analysis, the disassembly is annotated with execution counts, including those for indirect branch targets within a function (jump tables) and across functions (indirect and virtual function calls). E.g.:

 

  <Basic Block> .LFT35985

  Exec Count : 42

  Predecessors: .Ltmp935657

      00003c8b: leaq "JUMP_TABLE/foo/1.14"(%rip), %rcx

      00003c92: movslq (%rcx,%rax,4), %rax

      00003c96: addq %rcx, %rax

      00003c99: jmpq *%rax # JUMPTABLE @0x6e0f94

  Successors: .Ltmp935702 (count: 0, mispreds: 0),

              .Ltmp935705 (count: 41, mispreds: 26),

              .Ltmp935703 (count: 0, mispreds: 0),

              .Ltmp935704 (count: 1, mispreds: 0)

....

  <BasicBlock>.LFT43 (9 instructions, align : 1)

  Exec Count : 8

  Predecessors: .LBB01191

      00000028: movq %rdx, %rbx

      0000002b: leaq 0x20(%rsp), %rdi

      00000030: movl $0x2, %edx

      00000035: movq %rbx, %rsi

      00000038: callq *%rax # CallProfile: 8 (8 mispreds) :

              { f1: 3 (3 mispreds) },

              { f2: 1 (1 mispreds) },

              { f3: 4 (4 mispreds) }

      0000003a: movdqu 0x10(%rbx), %xmm0

      0000003f: movdqu %xmm0, 0x30(%rsp)

      00000045: movq %xmm0, %rcx

      0000004a: jmp .Ltmp26968

  Successors: .Ltmp26968 (count: 8, mispreds: 0)

 

With LLVM integration, the advanced disassembler can be added as a new standalone tool or as an extra feature to existing tools such as llvm-objdump.

 

3.3 Low-Level Program Instrumentation

 

Tools, such as memory sanitizers, rely on compiler-generated memory instrumentation to detect application errors at runtime. Suppose part of the application is written in assembly or comes from a library with no sources. In that case, such code could become a source of false positives and false negatives depending on the memory access types missed by the instrumentation. Since BOLT can instrument arbitrary code, independent of the source, it can complement compiler-based instrumentation and fill in the missing parts leading to a higher quality signal from the tool.

 

3.4 Static Analysis

 

BOLT offers an intuitive API to perform compiler-level analyses directly on machine code. Because BOLT reconstructs the control-flow graph of the program, it allows pass writers to extract arbitrary information beyond the scope of a single basic block with data-flow analyses. As an example, we can perform shrink wrapping by checking how stack-accessing instructions are using the frame in a given function and validating opportunities to move memory accesses in hot basic blocks to colder areas.

 

While this framework provides the optimization writer with greater reach over previously opaque external third-party binary code linked in the binary, perhaps the greatest value of this is in this code being visible at all. With static analysis, users can write passes to draw conclusions on safety concerns as well, such as checking if system or library calls are being used in a suspicious way without the need to execute the binary.

 

4. Plans

 

BOLT is a mature project that has been used in production for years, but we continue to develop BOLT and invest in new use-cases and optimizations. Below is a shortlist of areas that are currently under development:

1. Automatic profile collection and optimization
2. MachO support
3. LLD integration
4. Optimizing Linux kernel

 

--

BOLT Team

 

References

[1] Maksim Panchenko, Rafael Auler, Bill Nell, and Guilherme Ottoni. 2019. BOLT: a practical binary optimizer for data centers and beyond. In "Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization" (CGO 2019). IEEE Press, 2–14. https://research.fb.com/publications/bolt-a-practical-binary-optimizer-for-data-centers-and-beyond/

[2] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-September/135393.html

[3] Joe Savage and Timothy M. Jones. 2020. HALO: post-link heap-layout optimisation. In "Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization" (CGO 2020). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 94–106. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3368826.3377914

[4] https://github.com/facebookincubator/BOLT/issues/46

[5] Maksim Panchenko. 2016. Building Binary Optimizer with LLVM. 2016 European LLVM Developers' Meeting. https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-03/#presentation7

[6] https://github.com/facebookincubator/BOLT

[7] https://github.com/facebookincubator/BOLT/blob/master/llvm.patch

[8] perf: Linux profiling with performance counters. https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page.

[9] Runtime Performance Optimization Blueprint: Intel® Architecture Optimizations with LBR. https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/runtime-optimization-blueprint-IA-optimization-with-last-branch-record.html

[10] The HipHop Virtual Machine. https://hhvm.com/

[11] Propeller RFC. https://github.com/google/llvm-propeller/blob/plo-dev/Propeller_RFC.pdf. Updated performance results: https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-October/136030.html

 

 

[raghesh via llvm-dev]

Hi All,

I believe BOLT will be a very useful addition to the llvm tool set. We have already started using it and are thinking about adding more binary level analyses and optimizations.

Most importantly, the control flow graph and the disassembled code attached with debugging info turned out to be quite handy. Additionally, the associated tool llvm-boltdiff (to diff performance numbers of two different binaries) also was very useful.

Regards,

Raghesh

------------------------------

Raghesh Aloor

AMD India Pvt. Ltd.

Bengaluru.

------------------------------

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[Nick Desaulniers via llvm-dev]

Hi Maksim, you already know I'm a big fan of BOLT. Specifically for
the area under development of optimizing the Linux kernel, I think
BOLT could be a huge competitive advantage for LLVM. Any way we could
discuss/collaborate more on that? I look forward to seeing patches
upstreamed.

>
>
>
> --
>
> BOLT Team
>
>
>
> References
>
> [1] Maksim Panchenko, Rafael Auler, Bill Nell, and Guilherme Ottoni. 2019. BOLT: a practical binary optimizer for data centers and beyond. In "Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization" (CGO 2019). IEEE Press, 2–14. https://research.fb.com/publications/bolt-a-practical-binary-optimizer-for-data-centers-and-beyond/
>
> [2] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-September/135393.html
>
> [3] Joe Savage and Timothy M. Jones. 2020. HALO: post-link heap-layout optimisation. In "Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization" (CGO 2020). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 94–106. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3368826.3377914
>
> [4] https://github.com/facebookincubator/BOLT/issues/46
>
> [5] Maksim Panchenko. 2016. Building Binary Optimizer with LLVM. 2016 European LLVM Developers' Meeting. https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-03/#presentation7
>
> [6] https://github.com/facebookincubator/BOLT
>
> [7] https://github.com/facebookincubator/BOLT/blob/master/llvm.patch
>
> [8] perf: Linux profiling with performance counters. https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page.
>
> [9] Runtime Performance Optimization Blueprint: Intel® Architecture Optimizations with LBR. https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/runtime-optimization-blueprint-IA-optimization-with-last-branch-record.html
>
> [10] The HipHop Virtual Machine. https://hhvm.com/
>
> [11] Propeller RFC. https://github.com/google/llvm-propeller/blob/plo-dev/Propeller_RFC.pdf. Updated performance results: https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-October/136030.html
>
>
>
>
>

> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm...@lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev

--
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers

[Aditya K via llvm-dev]

> I believe BOLT will be a very useful addition to the llvm tool set. We have
> already started using it and are thinking about adding more binary level
> analyses and optimizations.

Good to learn that you are finding it useful. Did you use it for optimizing any application,
in that case it'll be useful to learn about performance improvements you've got.

> Most importantly, the control flow graph and the disassembled code attached
> with debugging info turned out to be quite handy. Additionally, the
> associated tool llvm-boltdiff (to diff performance numbers of two different
> binaries) also was very useful.

> Regards,
> Raghesh

[Tobias Hieta via llvm-dev]

Hello,

Thanks for your work on bolt. We tried to use it to speedup clang itself following the instructions in your github repo. 

The main problem we ran into with pref not being able to run on our AMD workstations nor in our VMs in the cloud. I know it's not exactly bolt related but are there other ways to generate this profile? Ideally we would collect data while building our app as part of our toolchain builder in the CI (as we do with PGO) - but I was not able to get this working with the perf tool. 

Thanks for your help.

Tobias

_______________________________________________

[Maksim Panchenko via llvm-dev]

Hi Nick,

Re-writing the kernel binary proved to be quite a challenge considering the number of techniques
used for code patching/modification at startup and runtime. We think we identified most of the
special ELF sections involved and started prototyping the support. It's going to be a fun journey.
I'd be happy to discuss the collaboration.

Maksim

[Maksim Panchenko via llvm-dev]

Hi Tobias,

 

If you have access to simple counters, such as CPU cycles, you can use those instead of LBRs.

We have instructions on our GitHub page on how to use this mode.

 

If you cannot run perf at all, we have implemented low-level instrumentation. It is not yet at

production-quality level, but you can give it a try and report any issues on GitHub:

 

  $ llvm-bolt a.out -instrument -instrumentation-file=instr.data -o a.out.bolt

 

Maksim

[Andrey Bokhanko via llvm-dev]

Hi Maksim,

Let me add my modest +1 to the idea of upstreaming Bolt. It goes to
the road less travelled (static binary optimizers), its usefulness
proved in the wild and confirmed by a third party (Google), so BOLT
would be a great addition to the set of LLVM-based tools!

When we tried to use BOLT on our AArch64-based platform, we faced with
a few hiccups, some of them due to BOLT being based on an outdated
LLVM lacking support for some of the latest AArch64 instructions. Such
kind of problems should disappear after upstreaming, which would be
great for all. Also, it would be easier for us to contribute our
patches (one CLA less to sign).

Thank you for working on BOLT and creating such a useful tool!

Yours,
Andrey
===
Director
Advanced Software Technology Lab
Huawei

[Srinivas, Suresh via llvm-dev]

Hi All,

I want to echo what others have been saying about adding BOLT to the llvm tool set.

 

I first want to thank to Maksim and his team at Facebook for developing and open sourcing this wonderful technology.

 

We at Intel have been experimenting with BOLT using the Intel Last Branch Record to improve Code Layout and have found it to be very valuable at

1. Reducing Instruction Cache Misses
2. Reducing Instruction TLB Misses
3. Reducing Pathlength (cpu instructions for unit of work)
4. Reducing Stall Cycles due to 1 and 2 and the Overall Cycles

See our technical report https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/runtime-optimization-blueprint-IA-optimization-with-last-branch-record.html where we have documented some of our experiences.

In addition we have encountered some hiccups with assembly routines like OpenSSL or v8 BuiltIns but the team has been making it more robust.

 

Adding it to LLVM will enable

1. Making it more robust and well supported for production uses.
2. Have more engineers contribute patches
3. More research and enhancements

 

However just adding it to the llvm toolset will not be sufficient. As BOLT operates on binaries, those binaries can be produced by other compilers (gcc, icc or builtins produced by v8 and added into the executable) and there are always new changes (eg gcc 8.x adds the endbr64 instruction) that can potentially break BOLT. I hope the community can collaborate to report and solve those problems early.

 

We also think with improvements to virtualization technologies like Intel Last Branch Record can be made available more broadly.

 

Thanks

 

Suresh Srinivas

Sr Principal Engineer

Intel

[Sriraman Tallam via llvm-dev]

Hello BOLT team,

 

tl;dr BOLT has shown that it can further optimize already heavily optimized binaries and we strongly welcome the efforts towards its inclusion into LLVM.

 

    Thank you for writing a detailed proposal for upstreaming BOLT to LLVM.  We, at Google, have used BOLT to optimize our internal benchmarks and we found that BOLT can further improve heavily optimized binaries by 2% to 6%.  This result inspired us to look closely at post-link optimizations and led to the development of Propeller.

 

    Regarding the upstreaming of BOLT, a suggestion we have is to split up BOLT into two pieces, the disassembler and the optimizer. The disassembler would live as a separate tool or a library which would disassemble the binary and lift it to a suitable IR (MCInst or MachineIR or other), and either dump into a file or put it in a memory buffer. Dumping to a file needs serialization support but efforts to serialize MachineIR are ongoing.  The BOLT optimizer can then pick up the MCInst/MachineIR and run the post-link optimizations converting it to optimized IR and then linking the final binary.  The advantage of this approach is that you do not need to rely on disassembly if MCInst IR from the original optimized build can be cached in a file, or the compiler backend could be re-run to regenerate the MCInst IR in a memory buffer, and you can directly kick off from the BOLT optimizer.   

 

We also wanted to clarify the questions about Propeller:

 

1. create_llvm_prof could indeed use some love. We are considering bringing it closer to llvm; that aside, we initially thought of leveraging it for Propeller's needs because it seemed the closest (it handles profile creation for AFDO). With the introduction of llvm-profgen https://reviews.llvm.org/D89707 , that is probably a more appropriate tool, and we're looking at integrating our work there instead.

2. We will shortly post detailed instructions on how to optimize the clang benchmark and mysql with Propeller which will clarify some of the questions you have raised here regarding performance regressions.

  

    We look forward to the patches and are happy to help with looking at how BOLT and Propeller could share common functionality within LLVM.

Best,

The Propeller Team.

_______________________________________________

[Chris Lattner via llvm-dev]

<just catching up on email>

Maksim, it seems like there is strong consensus to move all or parts of BOLT upstream.  How would you like to stage this in, and what do you think of Sriraman’s proposal below?

-Chris

[Danila Kutenin via llvm-dev]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for being a bit late with a response I just wanted to point out that at Yandex we used BOLT for the main search engine, it helped gain us 3-4% of additional performance. My colleagues will be very happy to see this technology merged into the LLVM toolchain.

Danila

[Sriraman Tallam via llvm-dev]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 1:23 PM Sriraman Tallam <tmsr...@google.com> wrote:

Hello BOLT team,

 

tl;dr BOLT has shown that it can further optimize already heavily optimized binaries and we strongly welcome the efforts towards its inclusion into LLVM.

 

    Thank you for writing a detailed proposal for upstreaming BOLT to LLVM.  We, at Google, have used BOLT to optimize our internal benchmarks and we found that BOLT can further improve heavily optimized binaries by 2% to 6%.  This result inspired us to look closely at post-link optimizations and led to the development of Propeller.

 

    Regarding the upstreaming of BOLT, a suggestion we have is to split up BOLT into two pieces, the disassembler and the optimizer. The disassembler would live as a separate tool or a library which would disassemble the binary and lift it to a suitable IR (MCInst or MachineIR or other), and either dump into a file or put it in a memory buffer. Dumping to a file needs serialization support but efforts to serialize MachineIR are ongoing.  The BOLT optimizer can then pick up the MCInst/MachineIR and run the post-link optimizations converting it to optimized IR and then linking the final binary.  The advantage of this approach is that you do not need to rely on disassembly if MCInst IR from the original optimized build can be cached in a file, or the compiler backend could be re-run to regenerate the MCInst IR in a memory buffer, and you can directly kick off from the BOLT optimizer.   

 

We also wanted to clarify the questions about Propeller:

 

1. create_llvm_prof could indeed use some love. We are considering bringing it closer to llvm; that aside, we initially thought of leveraging it for Propeller's needs because it seemed the closest (it handles profile creation for AFDO). With the introduction of llvm-profgen https://reviews.llvm.org/D89707 , that is probably a more appropriate tool, and we're looking at integrating our work there instead.

2. We will shortly post detailed instructions on how to optimize the clang benchmark and mysql with Propeller which will clarify some of the questions you have raised here regarding performance regressions.

We have posted detailed instructions on how to optimize a clang binary with Propeller here: https://github.com/google/autofdo/blob/propeller/OptimizeClangO3WithPropeller.md

We have also provided a script that pretty much does all of this: https://github.com/google/autofdo/blob/propeller/propeller_optimize_clang.sh

While  the instructions are about optimizing a clang baseline binary with default -O3,  it should be similar if the baseline binary is built with PGO+ThinLTO.

Please let us know if you have questions.

Thanks.

The Propeller Team.