Prof. Dr. Frank Bellosa, Marc Rittinghaus

Abstract:

Full System Simulators can be used as convenient tools for tracking and measuring runtime behavior of complete computer systems. One of their advantages is the ability to observe the complete state of the simulated system without modifying it. Unfortunately it is not sufficient to be able to measure, but it is essential to interpret the results. The fundamental problem of introspecting the state of the simulated system is the semantic gap; understanding the high-level meaning of a register value or the memory content is difficult from the perspective of the simulator. Current bridges for this gap have different drawbacks: (i) they are only intended to be used with snapshots of a system, (ii) they require modification of the simulated system or (iii) they are extremely slow.

This thesis proposes a new event-based introspection approach which can be used to observe the high-level state of a simulated system continuously, without requiring modifications to it. The resulting slowdown is moderate compared to other approaches.

BibTex:

@mastersthesis{julino14introspectionforfss,
 author = {Jonas Julino},
 title = {Lightweight Introspection for Full System Simulations},
 type = {Diploma Thesis},
 school = {System Architecture Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany},
 month = mar # "1",
 year = 2014,
 note = {\url{http://os.itec.kit.edu/}}
}