Evaluate using Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO)

Hi!

A few days ago I found an article about OpenVMM on Reddit - as far as I see, the project tries to deliver peak performance. Recently I checked Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) improvements on multiple projects including many projects - the results are available in the awesome-pgo repo. Since PGO has helped in many cases, I think it would be a good idea to try optimizing OpenVMM by applying PGO to it.

I can suggest the following things to do:

• We need to perform PGO benchmarks on OpenVMM. If it shows improvements - add a note about possible improvements to the documentation. Providing an easier way (e.g. a build option) to build scripts to build OpenVMM with PGO can be useful for the end-users too.
• It will be a good idea to integrate building with PGO into your CI pipelines. In this case, users will get already PGO-optimized binaries from the website (if you are going to provide prebuilt binaries, of course)

For the Rust projects, I suggest trying to start with cargo-pgo.

Here you can find different materials about PGO: benchmarks in different software, examples of how PGO is already integrated with different projects, PGO support in multiple Rust compilers, and some PGO-related pieces of advice.

After PGO, I suggest evaluating the LLVM BOLT optimizer - it can give more aggressive optimizations even after PGO. However, starting with regular PGO will be easier to do.

I would be happy to answer all your questions about PGO!

P.S. It's just an improvement idea for the project. I created the Issue since Discussions are disabled for the repository.