SRC Research Report 166
Efficient and Flexible Value Sampling
Mike Burrows, Ulfar Erlingson, Shun-Tak A. Leung, Mark T. Vandevoorde,
Carl A. Waldspurger, Kevin Walker, William E. Weihl
August 30, 2000
This paper presents novel sampling-based techniques for collecting
statistical profiles of register contents, data values, and other
information associated with instructions, such as memory latencies.
Values of interest are sampled in response to periodic interrupts.
The resulting value profiles can be analyzed by programmers and
optimizers to improve the performance of production uniprocessor and
multiprocessor systems.
Our value sampling system extends the DCPI continuous profiling
infrastructure, and inherits many of its desirable properties: our value
profiler has low overhead (approximately 10\% slowdown); it profiles all the
code in the system, including the operating system kernel; and it operates
transparently, without requiring any modifications to the profiled
code.
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