d1f3a3b91a
This patch adds Link-Time Optimization when building the fast target using gcc >= 4.6, and adds a scons flag to disable it (-no-lto). No check is performed to guarantee that the linker supports LTO and use of the linker plugin, so the user has to ensure that binutils GNU ld >= 2.21 or the gold linker is available. Typically, if gcc >= 4.6 is available, the latter should not be a problem. Currently the LTO option is only useful for gcc >= 4.6, due to the limited support on clang and earlier versions of gcc. The intention is to also add support for clang once the LTO integration matures. The same number of jobs is used for the parallel phase of LTO as the jobs specified on the scons command line, using the -flto=n flag that was introduced with gcc 4.6. The gold linker also supports concurrent and incremental linking, but this is not used at this point. The compilation and linking time is increased by almost 50% on average, although ARM seems to be particularly demanding with an increase of almost 100%. Also beware when using this as gcc uses a tremendous amount of memory and temp space in the process. You have been warned. After some careful consideration, and plenty discussions, the flag is only added to the fast target, and the warning that was issued in an earlier version of this patch is now removed. Similarly, the flag used to enable LTO, now the default is to use it, and the flag has been modified to disable LTO. The rationale behind this decision is that opt is used for development, whereas fast is only used for long runs, e.g. regressions or more elaborate experiments where the additional compile and link time is amortized by a much larger run time. When it comes to the return on investment, the regression seems to be roughly 15% faster with LTO. For a bit more detail, I ran twolf on ARM.fast, with three repeated runs, and they all finish within 42 minutes (+- 25 seconds) without LTO and 31 minutes (+- 25 seconds) with LTO, i.e. LTO gives an impressive >25% speed-up for this case. Without LTO (ARM.fast twolf) real 42m37.632s user 42m34.448s sys 0m0.390s real 41m51.793s user 41m50.384s sys 0m0.131s real 41m45.491s user 41m39.791s sys 0m0.139s With LTO (ARM.fast twolf) real 30m33.588s user 30m5.701s sys 0m0.141s real 31m27.791s user 31m24.674s sys 0m0.111s real 31m25.500s user 31m16.731s sys 0m0.106s |
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| build_opts | ||
| configs | ||
| ext | ||
| src | ||
| system | ||
| tests | ||
| util | ||
| .hgignore | ||
| .hgtags | ||
| COPYING | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| README | ||
| SConstruct | ||
This is the M5 simulator. For detailed information about building the simulator and getting started please refer to http://www.m5sim.org. Specific pages of interest are: http://www.m5sim.org/wiki/index.php/Compiling_M5 http://www.m5sim.org/wiki/index.php/Running_M5 Short version: 1. If you don't have SCons version 0.98.1 or newer, get it from http://wwww.scons.org. 2. If you don't have SWIG version 1.3.31 or newer, get it from http://wwww.swig.org. 3. Make sure you also have gcc version 3.4.6 or newer, Python 2.4 or newer (the dev version with header files), zlib, and the m4 preprocessor. 4. In this directory, type 'scons build/ALPHA_SE/tests/debug/quick'. This will build the debug version of the m5 binary (m5.debug) for the Alpha syscall emulation target, and run the quick regression tests on it. If you have questions, please send mail to m5-users@m5sim.org WHAT'S INCLUDED (AND NOT) ------------------------- The basic source release includes these subdirectories: - m5: - configs: simulation configuration scripts - ext: less-common external packages needed to build m5 - src: source code of the m5 simulator - system: source for some optional system software for simulated systems - tests: regression tests - util: useful utility programs and files To run full-system simulations, you will need compiled system firmware (console and PALcode for Alpha), kernel binaries and one or more disk images. These files for Alpha are collected in a separate archive, m5_system.tar.bz2. This file can he downloaded separately. Depending on the ISA used, M5 may support Linux 2.4/2.6, FreeBSD, and the proprietary Compaq/HP Tru64 version of Unix. We are able to distribute Linux and FreeBSD bootdisks, but we are unable to distribute bootable disk images of Tru64 Unix. If you have a Tru64 license and are interested in obtaining disk images, contact us at m5-users@m5sim.org