SkySquire is a versatile tool, or say a Swiss army knife, to help you revise the default behavior of softwares. For example, you can enable ‘-O3’ as a default option of your gcc/clang. With SkySquire, you don’t need to handle with all details of Makefiles and building system any more.
Revising Makefiles and building system is complex and error-prone. You never know what stupid mistakes you will make until things end up as disasters. Skymizer ever spent two full months on figuring out performance issues of an open source project, and found it just simply failed to pass the compiler correct flags. We once made a lot of changes on Ninja of Android just for applying different compiler flags on different source code. What we learned is, fighting with building system is interesting in the beginning but purely painful at last.
Spent your time with your family, not with revising Makefiles.
And, to save your time – your life – we released SkySquire.
Install SkySquire
Please approach us to receive the installment of SkySquire. Don’t stop here. I promise it’s free. We just haven’t got the time to design the ”disagree” button of the agreement interface while the law requires us to do so.
So send us a mail through little.sky@skymizer.com and you will find SkySquire on your doorstep.
Install via rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh ./skysquire-1.0-1.rpm
Install via deb
$ sudo dpkg -i ./skysquire-1.0-1.deb
After installment, the executive file of Evaluate will be under /usr/bin . As to README and other files will be under /usr/share/skysquire .
You may validate your install through
$ skysquire -h
And below will appear
Usage:
skysquire -mark-high [path of compiler]
...
Skymizer Evaluator version 1.0.3
http://www.skymizer.com
Congrats! It’s done!
Getting Started with Evaluate
The most popular case of using SkySquire is to evaluate the opportunity of compiler flag optimization.
To help you to evaluate it, we define two concepts: high watermark （-O3） and low watermark（-O0） to calculate the performance gap. You can use the following commands to change default options of gcc/clang.
Set high/low watermark on GCC
Supposedly we are going to add -O3 options to gcc, we can use the following instructions:
Set High Watermark
$ sudo skysquire -mark-high `which gcc`
Set Low Watermark
$ sudo skysquire -mark-low `which gcc`
After each settings, you should see the following message
----------------------------------------------------------------- • high-mark -O3 -----------------------------------------------------------------
That means you’ve already set the high watermark.
List Current Setting
Use -l and -list to list current settings
$ skysquire -l -verbose=3
You should see message like these:
/// *///
......... /// ....... ... ... .... .... ... ......... ......... ... ...
///////// /// //// /// *//////*////,//// */// ///////// ///////// ///*///
/// /// //// /// */// /// /// /// */// //// /// /// ////
///////// /////// ///./// /// /// /// */// ///// ///////// ///
/// /// ///. ////// /// /// /// */// .//// /// ///
///////// /// ///* //// /// /// /// */// ///////// ///////// ///
/////
Copyright (c) 2017 Skymizer Taiwan, Inc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
• high-mark -O3
locate in file://usr/bin/gcc
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SkySquire allows multiple users have different settings on the same compiler. If one user sets gcc at high watermark, and the other sets gcc at low watermark, the setting difference won’t interfere each other or results.
Clear All Settings:
Simply put -unmark as below:
$ sudo skysquire -tool `which gcc` -mark
Unlike listing all settings, clearing settings will interfere multiple users. Please notify others before execute this step. If you are not sure about the current status, please enter below:
$ sudo skysquire -tool `which gcc` -mark -fno-line
Show more information of SkySquire:
If you want SkySquire to show more information such as how to set location or option etc. You can use -verbose and -v to tune verbose level.
$ sudo skysquire -verbose=3
The number of occurrences of -v is the verbose level. For example, this sets verbose level to 3.
$ sudo skysquire -v -v -v
-quiet will set the verbose level to zero.
“Echo” – A Simple Example
Here, we use echo to explain how SkySquire works internally.
The following is our echo script:
#!/bin/bash echo "I got $*";
This script simply lists all scripts it received.
You can add number one! as default options to the echo script like this:
$ skysquire -tool ./echo.sh -mark number one!
Then echo.sh is equivalent to echo.sh [original options] number one! as we execute it.
$ ./echo.sh Skymizer I got Skymizer number one!
We can use skysquire -list to check all settings on the echo script.
$ skysquire -list
/// *///
......... /// ....... ... ... .... .... ... ......... ......... ... ...
///////// /// //// /// *//////*////,//// */// ///////// ///////// ///*///
/// /// //// /// */// /// /// /// */// //// /// /// ////
///////// /////// ///./// /// /// /// */// ///// ///////// ///
/// /// ///. ////// /// /// /// */// .//// /// ///
///////// /// ///* //// /// /// /// */// ///////// ///////// ///
/////
Copyright (c) 2017 Skymizer Taiwan, Inc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
• high-mark -O3
locate in file://usr/bin/gcc
• echo.sh number one!
locate in file://home/luba/examine/echo.sh
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FAQ
- What is the difference between using SkySquire and alias?
Alias can only adds options in front of the command lines while Evaluate adds them behind the command lines. Unfortunately, the options in the front are usually covered by the latter ones. In short, they won’t work well.
-
Is there any other techniques similar to Evaluate?
MPICH MPI CC uses similar techniques to modify compiler options. This approach is actually commonly used in open source projects. We simply release this tool to make it even much easier.
Reference
How to evaluate Skymizer Intelligent Compiler for your projects