Outline Functions

Outline functions can be created during feedback-optimized compilations. They represent code that is not normally executed, specifically code that is not executed during the training run used to generate the feedback for the final optimized compilation. A typical example is code that performs error checking on the return value from library functions; the error-handling code is never normally run. To improve paging and instruction-cache behavior, such code is moved elsewhere in the address space, and is made into a separate function. The name of the outline function encodes information about the section of outlined code, including the name of the function from which the code was extracted and the line number of the beginning of the section in the source code. These mangled names can vary from release to release. The Analyzer provides a readable version of the function name.

Outline functions are not really called, but rather are jumped to; similarly they do not return, they jump back. In order to make the behavior more closely match the user’s source code model, the Analyzer imputes an artificial call from the main function to its outline portion.

Outline functions are shown as normal functions, with the appropriate inclusive and exclusive metrics. In addition, the metrics for the outline function are added as inclusive metrics in the function from which the code was outlined.

For further details on feedback-optimized compilations, refer to the description of the -xprofile compiler option in Appendix B of the C User’s Guide, Appendix A of the C++ User’s Guide, or Chapter 3 of the Fortran User’s Guide.