HMTT: A Hybrid Hardware/Software Tracing System for Bridging Memory Trace's Semantic Gap

TL;DR

HMTT is a novel hybrid hardware/software system that captures memory traces with semantic context, enabling detailed analysis for architecture, software optimization, and performance tuning.

Contribution

It introduces the first hardware tracing system capable of correlating memory traces with high-level semantic information, combining hardware efficiency with software flexibility.

Findings

Accurately captures memory traces with semantic info

No distortion or pollution in hardware tracing

Provides flexible and detailed analysis capabilities

Abstract

Memory trace analysis is an important technology for architecture research, system software (i.e., OS, compiler) optimization, and application performance improvements. Hardware-snooping is an effective and efficient approach to monitor and collect memory traces. Compared with software-based approaches, memory traces collected by hardware-based approaches are usually lack of semantic information, such as process/function/loop identifiers, virtual address and I/O access. In this paper we propose a hybrid hardware/software mechanism which is able to collect memory reference trace as well as semantic information. Based on this mechanism, we designed and implemented a prototype system called HMTT (Hybrid Memory Trace Tool) which adopts a DIMMsnooping mechanism to snoop on memory bus and a software-controlled tracing mechanism to inject semantic information into normal memory trace. To the best of our knowledge, the HMTT system is the first hardware tracing system capable of correlating memory trace with high-level events. Comprehensive validations and evaluations show that the HMTT system has both hardware's (e.g., no distortion or pollution) and software's advantages (e.g., flexibility and more information).