Promote BOLT to the chromium team

[LifeIsStrange]

I'm pretty sure them not using it is a huge missed opportunity for end users performance (billions of humans) (and related projects such as Skia, ANGLE, freetype, etc)

That would be quite a meaningful utilitaristic goal.

[insilications]

Indeed, at such large scales the gains are huge.

[aaupov]

I'm pretty sure them not using it is a huge missed opportunity for end users performance (billions of humans) (and related projects such as Skia, ANGLE, freetype, etc)

That would be quite a meaningful utilitaristic goal.

I don't recall seeing an interest from chromium devs. Do you have any contacts? Feel free to ping them here.

[corona10]

@aaupov

FYI, CPython now adopt llvm-bolt as an experimental feature: python/cpython@214eb2c

I am expecting the usage through ./configure --enable-optimizations --with-lto --enable-bolt

[LifeIsStrange]

Friendly ping @nfischer
Since chromium use LTO and PGO, leveraging BOLT would be the next logical step for improving end users performance of the web

[nfischer]

It looks like folks on the Chromium build team are already thinking about this! 😄 I suggest you click the "star" icon for https://crbug.com/1163978 if you would like to be notified of further updates.

[aaupov]

Quick update: I tried to apply BOLT to Chromium but currently blocked by llvm/llvm-project#59794

[aaupov]

Update:

• stripping __typeid_ symbols with strip/llvm-strip is not possible due to dangling relocations:

not stripping symbol '__typeid__ZTSFvPKN4base8internal13BindStateBaseEE_global_addr' because it is named in a relocation

• skipping __typeid_ symbols in BOLT is a feasible workaround which unblocks processing of the binary (https://reviews.llvm.org/D141229)
• strict mode needs to be disabled in perf aggregation (perf2bolt) due to unclaimed PC-relative relocations
• Builtins_.* functions need to be skipped due to V8 (see Optimizing NodeJS with BOLT)
• the binary can be successfully processed by BOLT (no crash)
• however, the optimized binary crashes at startup due to SIGILL in malloc.cfi – looks like we're violating Clang's CFI invariants (https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ControlFlowIntegrity.html)

[aaupov]

On the first glance CFI enabled by Chromium on Linux/x86 in official build mode is non-trivial to support in BOLT. I'll try to run BOLT on just Release+PGO build to decide if further effort is worthwhile.

[aaupov]

I've made a post summarizing my findings: https://aaupov.github.io/blog/2022/11/12/bolt-chromium

In short, BOLT appears to be reasonably effective for Chromium, with Speedometer results comparable to that of PGO build (https://blog.chromium.org/2020/08/chrome-just-got-faster-with-profile.html): 7.7% speedup from PGO (Mac), ~6% speedup from BOLT (Linux) on top of PGO.

To note, BOLT profile definitely wasn't of the highest quality, so the performance can potentially be further improved.

[LifeIsStrange]

@aaupov this is huge!! I hope it will end up being enabled by default for public releases :)

[aaupov]

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1163978#c15