• Steinar H. Gunderson's avatar
    perf report: Support LLVM for addr2line() · c3f8644c
    Steinar H. Gunderson authored
    In addition to the existing support for libbfd and calling out to
    an external addr2line command, add support for using libllvm directly.
    
    This is both faster than libbfd, and can be enabled in distro builds
    (the LLVM license has an explicit provision for GPLv2 compatibility).
    
    Thus, it is set as the primary choice if available.
    
    As an example, running 'perf report' on a medium-size profile with
    DWARF-based backtraces took 58 seconds with LLVM, 78 seconds with
    libbfd, 153 seconds with external llvm-addr2line, and I got tired and
    aborted the test after waiting for 55 minutes with external bfd
    addr2line (which is the default for perf as compiled by distributions
    today).
    
    Evidently, for this case, the bfd addr2line process needs 18 seconds (on
    a 5.2 GHz Zen 3) to load the .debug ELF in question, hits the 1-second
    timeout and gets killed during initialization, getting restarted anew
    every time. Having an in-process addr2line makes this much more robust.
    
    As future extensions, libllvm can be used in many other places where
    we currently use libbfd or other libraries:
    
     - Symbol enumeration (in particular, for PE binaries).
     - Demangling (including non-Itanium demangling, e.g. Microsoft
       or Rust).
     - Disassembling (perf annotate).
    
    However, these are much less pressing; most people don't profile PE
    binaries, and perf has non-bfd paths for ELF. The same with demangling;
    the default _cxa_demangle path works fine for most users, and while bfd
    objdump can be slow on large binaries, it is possible to use
    --objdump=llvm-objdump to get the speed benefits.  (It appears
    LLVM-based demangling is very simple, should we want that.)
    
    Tested with LLVM 14, 15, 16, 18 and 19. For some reason, LLVM 12 was not
    correctly detected using feature_check, and thus was not tested.
    
    Committer notes:
    
     Added the name and a __maybe_unused to address:
    
       1    13.50 almalinux:8                   : FAIL gcc version 8.5.0 20210514 (Red Hat 8.5.0-22) (GCC)
        util/srcline.c: In function 'dso__free_a2l':
        util/srcline.c:184:20: error: parameter name omitted
         void dso__free_a2l(struct dso *)
                            ^~~~~~~~~~~~
        make[3]: *** [/git/perf-6.11.0-rc3/tools/build/Makefile.build:158: util] Error 2
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSteinar H. Gunderson <sesse@google.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    Cc: Ian Rogers <irogers@google.com>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240803152008.2818485-1-sesse@google.comSigned-off-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    c3f8644c
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