Code Positioning in LLVM Henrik Lehtonen Klas Sonesson September 22, 2017 Master’s thesis work carried out at the Department of Computer Science, Lund University. Supervisor: Jonas Skeppstedt,
[email protected] Examiner: Krzysztof Kuchcinski,
[email protected] Abstract Given the increasing performance disparity between processor speeds and memory latency, making efficient use of cache memory is more important than ever to achieve good performance in memory-bound workloads. Many modern first-level caches store instructions separately from data, making code layout and code size an important factor in the cache behavior of a program. This work investigates two methods that attempt to improve code locality, namely procedure splitting and procedure positioning, previously investigated by Pettis and Hansen. They are implemented in the open-source compiler framework LLVM to evaluate their effect on the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite and a benchmark run of the PostgreSQL database system. We found that our implementation is highly situational, but can be beneficial, reducing execution time by up to 3% on suitable SPEC benchmarks and an increase of 3% in average transactions per second on PostgreSQL. Keywords: Compiler optimization, Instruction caches, TLBs, LLVM, Code locality 2 Acknowledgements We would like to thank our supervisor Jonas Skeppstedt for his guidance, providing many tips and interesting discussions along the way. We would also like to thank our examiner Krzysztof Kuchcinski for his useful comments on the report. 3 4 Contents 1 Introduction 7 2 Background 9 2.1 Memory . .9 2.1.1 Caches . .9 2.1.2 Virtual memory and paging . 10 2.2 Program profiling .