ATUM: A New Technique for Capturing Address Traces Using Microcode,
Abstract
Trace-driven simulation is often used in the design of computer systems, especially caches and translation lookaside buffers. Capturing address traces to drive such simulations has been problematic, often involving 1000:1 software overhead to trace a target workload, and/or mechanisms that cause significant distortions in the recorded data. A new technique for capturing address traces has been developed to sue a processor's microcode to record addresses in a reserved part of main memory as a side effect of normal execution. An experimental implementation of this technique on a VAX 8200 processor shows a number of advantages over previous techniques, including fewer distortions of the address trace and a hundred times faster recording. With this technique, it is possible to gather full operating-system traces of multi-tasking workloads. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1986
- Accession Number
- ADA178074
Entities
People
- Anant Agarwal
- Mark Horowitz
- Richard L. Sites
Organizations
- Stanford University