Profiling astcenc

This page contains some developer notes on profiling astcenc using command line tools on Linux hosts.

Building for profiling

It is recommended to profile release builds, but you will need debug symbols. It is also recommended to disable link-time optimization to get call stacks that vaguely resemble the source code, although beware because this means that you are not quite profiling the reality of full release builds.

Both of these can be achieved using the following CMake build type:

 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo

Running Callgrind tools

We provide a helper script that wraps Callgrind for hotspot profiling, although beware that it only currently supports profiling LDR input images and the single compression mode.

This script requires the following tools on your PATH:

valgrind
gprof2dot
dot

Run the helper script from the root of the repository using, e.g.:

python3 ./Test/astc_profile_valgrind.py <image.png> --test-quality fastest

The output will be two files:

perf_<quality>.png: an annotated call graph.
perf_<quality>.txt: the top N functions table.

Viewing disassembly

Standard syntax x86-64 disassembly can be generated using:

objdump -C -M intel --no-show-raw -d -S <binary> > dis.txt