Dangling probes are the probes associated to an empty block. This usually happens when all real instructions are optimized away from the block. There is a problem with dangling probes during the offline counts processing. The way the sample profiler works is that samples collected on the first physical instruction following a probe will be counted towards the probe. This logically equals to treating the instruction next to a probe as if it is from the same block of the probe. In the dangling probe case, the real instruction following a dangling probe actually starts a new block, and samples collected on the new block may cause issues when counted towards the empty block.
To mitigate this issue, we first try to move around a dangling probe inside its owning block. If there are still native instructions preceding the probe in the same block, we can then use them as a place holder to collect samples for the probe. A pass is added to walk each block backwards looking for probes not followed by any real instruction and moving them before the first real instruction. This is done right before the object emission.
If we are unlucky to find such in-block preceding instructions for a probe, the solution we are taking is to tag such probe as dangling so that the samples reported for them will not be trusted by the compiler. We leave it up to the counts inference algorithm to get such probes a reasonable count. The number `UINT64_MAX` is used to mark sample count as collected for a dangling probe.
Reviewed By: wmi
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D95962
This change enables pseudo-probe-based sample counts to be consumed by the sample profile loader under the regular `-fprofile-sample-use` switch with minimal adjustments to the existing sample file formats. After the counts are imported, a probe helper, aka, a `PseudoProbeManager` object, is automatically launched to verify the CFG checksum of every function in the current compilation against the corresponding checksum from the profile. Mismatched checksums will cause a function profile to be slipped. A `SampleProfileProber` pass is scheduled before any of the `SampleProfileLoader` instances so that the CFG checksums as well as probe mappings are available during the profile loading time. The `PseudoProbeManager` object is set up right after the profile reading is done. In the future a CFG-based fuzzy matching could be done in `PseudoProbeManager`.
Samples will be applied only to pseudo probe instructions as well as probed callsites once the checksum verification goes through. Those instructions are processed in the same way that regular instructions would be processed in the line-number-based scenario. In other words, a function is processed in a regular way as if it was reduced to just containing pseudo probes (block probes and callsites).
**Adjustment to profile format **
A CFG checksum field is being added to the existing AutoFDO profile formats. So far only the text format and the extended binary format are supported. For the text format, a new line like
```
!CFGChecksum: 12345
```
is added to the end of the body sample lines. For the extended binary profile format, we introduce a metadata section to store the checksum map from function names to their CFG checksums.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D92347
Hongtao Yu