Solaris Application Programming

by Gove, Darryl

• ISBN13: 9780138134556
• ISBN10: 0138134553
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-27
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

The detailed guide for developers who want to get the best performance out of their Solaris system.

Author Biography

A senior engineer in the Compiler Performance Engineering group at Sun Microsystems, Darryl Gove analyzes and optimizes application performance on current and future UltraSPARC systems. He is a regular contributor to the developer portal (http://developers.sun.com) and maintains a blog on developer topics (http://blogs.sun.com/d). Prior to joining Sun, Darryl worked for several U.K. organizations in software architecture and development. He earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Operational Research from the University of Southampton, U.K.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xix
Overview of the Processor	p. 1
The Generic Processor	p. 3
Chapter Objectives	p. 3
The Components of a Processor	p. 3
Clock Speed	p. 4
Out-of-Order Processors	p. 5
Chip Multithreading	p. 6
Execution Pipes	p. 7
Caches	p. 11
Interacting with the System	p. 14
Virtual Memory	p. 16
Indexing and Tagging of Memory	p. 18
Instruction Set Architecture	p. 18
The SPARC Family	p. 21
Chapter Objectives	p. 21
The UltraSPARC Family	p. 21
The SPARC Instruction Set	p. 23
32-bit and 64-bit Code	p. 30
The UltraSPARC III Family of Processors	p. 30
UltraSPARC T1	p. 37
UltraSPARC T2	p. 37
SPARC64 VI	p. 38
The x64 Family of Processors	p. 39
Chapter Objectives	p. 39
The x64 Family of Processors	p. 39
The x86 Processor: CISC and RISC	p. 40
Byte Ordering	p. 41
Instruction Template	p. 42
Registers	p. 43
Instruction Set Extensions and Floating Point	p. 46
Memory Ordering	p. 46
Developer Tools	p. 47
Informational Tools	p. 4
Chapter Objectives	p. 49
Tools That Report System Configuration	p. 49
Tools That Report Current System Status	p. 55
Process- and Processor-Specific Tools	p. 72
Information about Applications	p. 84
Using the Compiler	p. 93
Chapter Objectives	p. 93
Three Sets of Compiler Options	p. 93
Using -xtarget=generic on x86	p. 95
Optimization	p. 96
Generating Debug Information	p. 102
Selecting the Target Machine Type for an Application	p. 103
Code Layout Optimizations	p. 107
General Compiler Optimizations	p. 116
Pointer Aliasing in C and C++	p. 123
Other C- and C++-Specific Compiler Optimizations	p. 133
Fortran-Specific Compiler Optimizations	p. 135
Compiler Pragmas	p. 136
Using Pragmas in C for Finer Aliasing Control	p. 142
Compatibility with GCC	p. 147
Floating-Point Optimization	p. 149
Chapter Objectives	p. 149
Floating-Point Optimization Flags	p. 149
Floating-Point Multiply Accumulate Instructions	p. 173
Integer Math	p. 174
Floating-Point Parameter Passing with SPARC V8 Code	p. 178
Libraries and Linking	p. 181
Introduction	p. 181
Linking	p. 181
Libraries of Interest	p. 193
Library Calls	p. 199
Performance Profiling Tools	p. 207
Introduction	p. 207
The Sun Studio Performance Analyzer	p. 207
Collecting Profiles	p. 208
Compiling for the Performance Analyzer	p. 210
Viewing Profiles Using the GUI	p. 210
Caller Callee Information	p. 212
Using the Command-Line Tool for Performance Analysis	p. 214
Interpreting Profiles	p. 215
Intepreting Profiles from UltraSPARC III/IV Processors	p. 217
Profiling Using Performance Counters	p. 218
Interpreting Call Stacks	p. 219
Generating Mapfiles	p. 222
Generating Reports on Performance Using spot	p. 223
Profiling Memory Access Patterns	p. 226
er_kernel	p. 233
Tail-Call Optimization and Debug	p. 235
Gathering Profile Information Using gprof	p. 237
Using tcov to Get Code Coverage Information	p. 239
Using dtrace to Gather Profile and Coverage Information	p. 241
Compiler Commentary	p. 244
Correctness and Debug	p. 247
Introduction	p. 247
Compile-Time Checking	p. 248
Runtime Checking	p. 256
Debugging Using dbx	p. 262
Locating Optimization Bugs Using ATS	p. 271
Debugging Using mdb	p. 274
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

About This Book This book is a guide to getting the best performance out of computers running the Solaris operating system. The target audience is developers and software architects who are interested in using the tools that are available, as well as those who are interested in squeezing the last drop of performance out of the system. The book caters to those who are new to performance analysis and optimization, as well as those who are experienced in the area. To do this, the book starts with an overview of processor fundamentals, before introducing the tools and getting into the details. One of the things that distinguishes this book from others is that it is a practical guide. There are often two problems to overcome when doing development work. The first problem is knowing the tools that are available. This book is written to cover the breadth of tools available today and to introduce the common uses for them. The second problem is interpreting the output from the tools. This book includes many examples of tool use and explains their output. One trap this book aims to avoid is that of explaining how to manually do the optimizations that the compiler performs automatically. The book's focus is on identifying the problems using appropriate tools and solving the problems using the easiest approach. Sometimes, the solution is to use different compiler flags so that a particular hot spot in the application is optimized away. Other times, the solution is to change the code because the compiler is unable to perform the optimization; I explain this with insight into why the compiler is unable to transform the code. Goals and Assumptions The goals of this book are as follows. Provide a comprehensive introduction to the components that influence processor performance. Introduce the tools that you can use for performance analysis and improvement, both those that ship with the operating system and those that ship with the compiler. Introduce the compiler and explain the optimizations that it supports to enable improved performance. Discuss the features of the SPARC and x64 families of processors and demonstrate how you can use these features to improve application performance. Talk about the possibilities of using multiple processors or threads to enable better performance, or more efficient use of computer resources. The book assumes that the reader is comfortable with the C programming language. This language is used for most of the examples in the book. The book also assumes a willingness to learn some of the lower-level details about the processors and the instruction sets that the processors use. The book does not attempt to go into the details of processor internals, but it does introduce some of the features of modern processors that will have an effect on application performance. The book assumes that the reader has access to the Sun Studio compiler and tools. These tools are available as free downloads. Most of the examples come from using Sun Studio 12, but any recent compiler version should yield similar results. The compiler is typically installed in /opt/SUNWspro/bin/ and it is assumed that the compiler does appear on the reader's path. The book focuses on Solaris 10. Many of the tools discussed are also available in prior versions. I note in the text when a tool has been introduced in a relatively recent version of Solaris. Chapter Overview Part IOverview of the Processor Chapter 1The Generic Processor Chapter 2The SPARC Family Chapter 3The x64 Family of Processors Part IIDeveloper Tools Chapter 4Informational Tools Chapter 5Using the Compiler Chapter 6Floating-Point Optimization Chapter 7Libraries and Linking