cmd/compile: pgo support for external Linux perf profiles and perf_data_converter

[zamazan4ik]

Go PGO docs mentions some support for the external profile tooling and has a reference to the external page about supported PGO tools. Having support for the external profiling tooling is important since some organizations already have their profiling infrastructure (GWP in Google, Perforator in Yandex, sometimes even Grafana Pyroscope or similar in-house solutions).

The official documentation explicitly mentions widely used Linux' perf profiles for PGO purposes. Using these profiles are common thing in the C++ world due to sampling PGO support with AutoFDO tooling.

pprof package has a reference to a converter from Linux perf profiles to pprof profiles - https://github.com/google/perf_data_converter . Did anyone try to test it with Go PGO? Is it possible with this tool to use perf profiles to enable PGO optimization with the current PGO infrastructure in the Go compiler?

If it works, I suggest adding a mention about perf_data_converter to the https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PGO-Tools page. Having a possibility to use Linux' perf profiles can be important since it allows users to implement company-wide PGO optimization pipelines in the same way as it's done for C++ infrastructure (infrastructure and tooling reusage, you know).

[dmitshur]

CC @golang/compiler.

[prattmic]

https://github.com/google/perf_data_converter should be the way to do this, but there a couple of minor roadblocks:

1. perf_data_converter doesn't symbolize its output profile (it just contains PCs). That's not a fundamental problem, as pprof will symbolize profiles, so you could do something like pprof -proto converted.pprof > symbolized.pprof. But this leads to problem 2.
2. pprof symbolization doesn't set the Function.start_line field in the profiles, which Go's PGO requires. This should be a fairly small change to pprof to support, but it hasn't been done yet.

[zamazan4ik]

pprof symbolization doesn't set the Function.start_line field in the profiles, which Go's PGO requires. This should be a fairly small change to pprof to support, but it hasn't been done yet.

Do we need to create a separate issue in the pprof repo to add this functionality?

[prattmic]

I filed https://github.com/google/pprof/issues/823 for this, including a prototype implementation.

This made me realize one more tiny snag: the compiler is picky about the sample types reported by the profile (mostly to warn users if they try to use a heap profile or something), but the sample types selected by perf_to_profile aren't quite right. It is easy to change them [1], but we should probably just make the compiler less picky.

[1]

change_sample.go:

package main

import (
        "os"

        "github.com/google/pprof/profile"
)

func main() {
        p, _ := profile.Parse(os.Stdin)
        p.SampleType = []*profile.ValueType{
                {
                        Type: "event",
                        Unit: "count",
                },
                {
                        Type: "samples",
                        Unit: "count",
                },
        }
        p.Write(os.Stdout)
}

$ go run change_sample.go < perf.pprof > perf.changed.pprof

[insilications]

It would be nice to see perf_data_converter (which is used by pprof) being able to provide symbolize and the correct Function.start_line for golang's PGO.