research-article

Hardware-based data value and address trace filtering techniques

Authors:

Vladimir Uzelac,

Aleksandar MilenkovićAuthors Info & Claims

CASES '10: Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems

Pages 117 - 126

https://doi.org/10.1145/1878921.1878940

Published: 24 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Capturing program and data traces during program execution unobtrusively in real-time is crucial in debugging and testing of cyber-physical systems. However, tracing a complete program unobtrusively is often cost-prohibitive, requiring large on-chip trace buffers and wide trace ports. Whereas program execution traces can be efficiently compressed in hardware, compression of data address and data value traces is much more challenging due to limited redundancy. In this paper we describe two hardware-based filtering techniques for data traces: cache first-access tracking for load data values and data address filtering using partial register-file replay. The results of our experimental analysis indicate that the proposed filtering techniques can significantly reduce the size of the data traces (~5 20 times for the load data value trace, depending on the data cache size; and ~5 times for the data address trace) at the cost of rather small hardware structures in the trace module.

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Cited By

Uzelac VMilenkovic AMilenkovic MBurtscher M(2014)Using Branch Predictors and Variable Encoding for On-the-Fly Program TracingIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2012.26763:4(1008-1020)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2012.267
Uzelac VMilenković A(2013)Hardware-Based Load Value Trace Filtering for On-the-Fly DebuggingACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/2465787.246579912:2s(1-18)Online publication date: 1-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2465787.2465799

Index Terms

Hardware-based data value and address trace filtering techniques

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CASES '10: Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems

October 2010

276 pages

ISBN:9781605589039

DOI:10.1145/1878921

Program Chairs:
Vinod Kathail
USA
,
Reid Tatge
Texas Instruments, USA
,
Rajeev Barua
University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 24 October 2010

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October 24 - 29, 2010

Arizona, Scottsdale, USA

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Cited By

Uzelac VMilenkovic AMilenkovic MBurtscher M(2014)Using Branch Predictors and Variable Encoding for On-the-Fly Program TracingIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2012.26763:4(1008-1020)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2012.267
Uzelac VMilenković A(2013)Hardware-Based Load Value Trace Filtering for On-the-Fly DebuggingACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/2465787.246579912:2s(1-18)Online publication date: 1-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2465787.2465799

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