CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Real-Time Unobtrusive Tracing in Multicore Embedded Systems

CSR：小型：协作研究：多核嵌入式系统中的实时非侵入式跟踪

• 批准号: 1217231
• 负责人: Martin Burtscher
• 金额: $ 17.3万
• 依托单位: Texas State University - San Marcos
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1217231&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Small; Collaborative; Research; Real

Embedded computer systems have become essential to many aspects of our lives. Cheaper, smaller, faster, more sophisticated, and more energy-efficient embedded devices spur ever new applications. However, the growing complexity and shift to multicores make programming and debugging these systems difficult. Traditional debugging is time consuming and may interfere with program execution, causing some bugs to become irreproducible and making it unusable in real-time environments. Moreover, tracing a processor?s internal state during execution is only feasible for short program segments and requires large on-chip buffers or wide trace ports, either of which increases system cost and limits scalability. This project is developing the next generation of trace compression methods and infrastructure to make continuous, real-time, unobtrusive, and cost-effective program, data, and bus tracing possible in embedded systems. The approach relies on on-chip hardware to record the processor state and corresponding software modules in the debugger. The novel insight is that a sequence of trace records can be translated, without loss of information, into a much shorter sequence of miss events using small hardware structures. The few remaining miss events are then further compressed using highly-effective yet simple-to-implement encoding schemes, yielding heretofore unseen compression ratios.The new tracing and debugging infrastructure can help programmers find difficult and intermittent software bugs faster, thus improving productivity. For example, reducing debugging time by just one percent amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars annually in saved salaries, with a concomitant reduction in software cost and time to market. Moreover, higher quality software may eliminate errors in medical, automotive, or mission-critical devices and thus save lives.

嵌入式计算机系统对于我们生活的许多方面都至关重要。便宜，更小，更快，更复杂，更节能的嵌入式设备刺激了新应用。但是，日益增长的复杂性并转移到多核使编程和调试这些系统变得困难。传统的调试是耗时的，可能会干扰程序的执行，从而导致一些错误变得不可重复，并且使其在实时环境中无法使用。此外，在执行过程中追踪处理器的内部状态仅适用于简短的程序段，并且需要大型的芯片缓冲区或宽带端口，这两种端口都会增加系统成本并限制可扩展性。 该项目正在开发下一代的痕量压缩方法和基础架构，以使嵌入式系统中可能进行连续，实时，不引人注目的和具有成本效益的程序，数据和总线。该方法依靠片上硬件来记录处理器状态和调试器中的相应软件模块。新颖的见解是，可以将一系列痕量记录转换为使用小型硬件结构的较短的错过事件序列。然后，使用高效但简单实施的编码方案进一步压缩了剩下的少数失误事件，从而产生了迄今为止看不见的压缩比。新的跟踪和调试基础架构可以帮助程序员发现困难且间歇性的软件错误速度更快，从而提高了生产力。例如，将调试时间减少一百分之一，每年节省的薪水每年数亿美元，而软件成本和上市时间也随之减少了。此外，高质量的软件可能会消除医疗，汽车或关键任务设备的错误，从而挽救生命。