1081776 - Remove tools/reorder/, which is ancient and unused

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

tools/reorder/ has a lot of code that appears to be be devoted to an attempt to
reorder functions in binaries to improve performance. grope.cpp has a comment
at the top:

> A program that computes a function ordering for an executable based
> on runtime profile information.
> 
> This program is directly based on work done by Roger Chickering
> <[e-mail]> in
> 
>   <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65845>
> 
> to implement Nat Friedman's <[e-mail]> `grope',
> 
>   _GNU Rope - A Subroutine Position Optimizer_
>   <http://www.hungry.com/~shaver/grope/grope.ps>
> 
> Specifically, it implements the procedure re-ordering algorithm
> described in:
> 
>   K. Pettis and R. Hansen. ``Profile-Guided Core Position.'' In
>   _Proceedings of the Int. Conference on Programming Language Design
>   and Implementation_, pages 16-27, June 1990.

All this code was checked in by Chris Waterson in November 2001 with a commit
message that only said "First commit". I don't know if there's a bug associated
with it. It has only received trivial license and grammar-nazi changes since
then, e.g. see:
https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/7756488dffc09f67790b14d2141f640aefd662b7/tools/reorder

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't compile, and the whole enterprise sounds like
something that should be done as part of PGO builds or not at all.

Comment 1

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

Attachment: Remove tools/reorder/, which is ancient and unused

19 files changed, 2495 deletions(-)

Comment 2

[Nathan Froyd [:froydnj]]

Comment on attachment 8503845 [details] [diff] [review]
Remove tools/reorder/, which is ancient and unused

Review of attachment 8503845 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

WFM.

Comment 3

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/dc83111c2f87

Comment 4

[Ryan VanderMeulen (PTO, back July 27)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/dc83111c2f87