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已经变得至关重要。更便宜、更小、更快、更复杂、更节能的嵌入式设备催生了新的应用。然而，日益增长的复杂性以及向多核的转变使得这些系统的编程和调试变得困难。传统的调试非常耗时，并且可能会干扰程序的执行，导致一些错误变得不可重现，并使其在实时环境中无法使用。此外，在执行期间跟踪处理器的内部状态仅适用于短程序段，并且需要大片上缓冲区或宽跟踪端口，这两者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跟踪压缩方法和基础设施，以使嵌入式系统中的连续、实时、不引人注目且经济高效的程序、数据和总线跟踪成为可能。该方法依靠片上硬件来记录处理器状态以及调试器中相应的软件模块。新颖的见解是，可以使用小型硬件结构将一系列跟踪记录转换为更短的未命中事件序列，而不会丢失信息。然后，使用高效但易于实现的编码方案进一步压缩剩余的少数未命中事件，从而产生前所未有的压缩比。新的跟踪和调试基础设施可以帮助程序员更快地发现困难和间歇性的软件错误，从而提高生产力。例如，仅将调试时间减少百分之一，每年就可以节省数亿美元的工资，同时还可以减少软件成本并缩短上市时间。此外，更高质量的软件可以消除医疗、汽车或关键任务设备中的错误，从而挽救生命。