Intel Appears On The Verge Of Some Exciting Performance Optimizations For Linux Distros
Over the years on Phoronix you’ve likely read an article or two about BOLT that was developed by Facebook/Meta for optimizing the layout of generated binaries. BOLT made it to the mainline LLVM codebase last year with LLVM 14 for helping to optimize binaries. Facebook has even demonstrated its potential for speeding up the Linux kernel via BOLT as well as enhancing the performance of user-space applications and other software.
The downside of this post-link optimizer is that it relies on first having to collect an application’s execution profile via the Linux perf sampling. It’s similar to compiler Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) in that you first need to collect an accurate profile of the software being built before feeding that into BOLT for being able to optimize the binary of large applications.
It turns out Intel’s Clear Linux engineers have been investigating BOLT and ultimately coming up with some new yet-to-be-announced solution for carrying out similar optimizations that can be done at a Linux OS/distribution level scale.
