A Post-link Prefetching Based on Event Sampling

Abstract

Data prefetching is an effective approach to improve performance by hiding long memory latency. Existing profiling feedback optimizations can do well in pointer-based linked data structure prefetching. However, these optimizations, which instrument and optimize source code during compiling or post link, usually incur tremendous overhead at profiling stage. Furthermore, it is a mission impossible for these methods to do optimization without source code. This work designs and implements an Event Sampling based Prefetching Optimizer, which is a post-link prefetching based on hardware performance counters event sampling. Evaluation on SW26010 processor shows that with the proposed prefetching approach, 9 out of 29 programs of SPEC2006 can be speeded up by about 4.3% on average with only less than 10% sampling overhead on average.