A User-Friendly Methodology for Automatic Exploration of Compiler Options.
Haiping Wu, Long Chen, Joseph Manzano, Guang R. Gao · 2006
Finding an optimized combination of compiler options that benefits the most a given embedded application is a challenge for most application developers. It is only with a deep understanding of the application at hand and a fairly good knowledge of the compiler features that a program-mer can achieve the desired results in terms of performance, power consumption and code size out of an application. We have developed a practical methodology for auto-matic exploring compiler options (UMECO) to solve the problem mentioned above. This paper reports a case study of this methodology on the Intel XScale microarchitecture. Based on practical experimentation, we enhance KCC, our research compiler infrastructure, with an extended user in-terface that the users can provide advice to. All are con-trolled by a reduced set of compiler flags. We also demon-strate a compiler trade-off strategy based on experimental results for a set of well known embedded benchmarks.