ATUM: a new technique for capturing address traces using microcode
- 1 May 1986
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
- Vol. 14 (2), 119-127
- https://doi.org/10.1145/17356.17370
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 use 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 1 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.Keywords
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