HMTT: A Hybrid Hardware/Software Tracing System for Bridging Memory Trace's Semantic Gap
Yungang Bao, Jinyong Zhang, Yan Zhu, Dan Tang, Yuan Ruan, Mingyu Chen,, Jianping Fan

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Data Storage Technologies · Security and Verification in Computing · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
