OpenMandriva Appears To Be Experimenting With Profile Guided Optimizations

OpenMandriva has been toying with some performance optimizations in recent times like preferring the LLVM Clang compiler over GCC, spinning an AMD Zen "znver1" optimized version of the OS/packages, and apparently now exploring possible Profile Guided Optimizations.

Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) basically involve feeding the feedback of profiling data back into the compiler so it can better optimize the generated code based upon actual usage behavior of the software under test. PGO can pay off big time depending upon the code-base and how well the profile data models real-world workflows of the said software in question.

OpenMandriva developer Tomasz Paweł Gajc appears to now be dabbling with PGO'ing of software in OpenMandriva's "Cooker" development archive. When PGO'ing their XZ build, he found the decompression times to drop from 8~9 seconds down to 7 seconds while the compression times that are much longer did drop by a few seconds too. Details in this forum post.

Here's to hoping more of OpenMandriva (and other Linux distributions) will move onto evaluating PGO and other optimizations like LTO (Link Time Optimizations) and AutoFDO for greater performance optimizations, some of which are already employed by the likes of Clear Linux for juicing more performance out of the system.