Use the llvm flag -pgo-function-entry-coverage to create single byte "counters" to track functions coverage. This mode has significantly less size overhead in both code and data because
- We mark a function as "covered" with a store instead of an increment which generally requires fewer assembly instructions
- We use a single byte per function rather than 8 bytes per block
The trade off of course is that this mode only tells you if a function has been covered. This is useful, for example, to detect dead code.
When combined with debug info correlation [0] we are able to create an instrumented Clang binary that is only 150M (the vanilla Clang binary is 143M). That is an overhead of 7M (4.9%) compared to the default instrumentation (without value profiling) which has an overhead of 31M (21.7%).
is there a test case for this?