A loop-centric profiling method for embedded applications

Embedded applications usually impose tight constraints upon their code efficiency, which entail elaborate code optimization on the hotspot of the programs. In order to identify the hotspot, we propose an effective and easy-use loop-centric profiling method in this paper. In our proposed method, a code isolation step is first applied on the original code, which extracts all the candidate loops at source level and keeps the original semantic unchanged. Then we can use an off-the-shelf profiling tool to identify our interested loops in the program on a given platform. Our method is retargetable as long as the profiler for the target platform is available. In our experiments, we tested our method using the MPEG-2 decoder application on ARM platform, and we can see that the results provide helpful information for further optimization on the application code.