Existing Profiling Tools Research Articles

베이스보드 매니지먼트 컨트롤러를 위한 부팅 과정 프로파일링 도구

Baseboard Management Controller(BMC) supports server monitoring, maintenance, and control functions using various communication interfaces. However, if an unexpected problem occurs during the device driver initialization process, the BMC may not operate normally. Therefore, a boot process profiling tool that accurately analyzes the device driver initialization process and provides a function to check the analysis result is essential. Existing boot process profiling tools do not specifically provide the device driver initialization process and results required for BMC boot process analysis, forcing developers to use a combination of tools to analyze the boot process in detail. In this paper, we propose an integrated profiling tool for BMC's booting process. The proposed tool provides device driver initialization process analysis, CPU and memory usage analysis, and kernel version management functions. Users can easily analyze the booting process using the proposed tool, and the analysis result can be used to shorten the booting time. Also, the proposed tool is implemented in Linux-based BMC, and it is shown that the proposed tool is more efficient than the existing profiling tool.

Прикладное применение динамического анализа программ, исполняющихся в интерпретирующих средах

The present-day trends in software engineering include the steady increase of code and design complexity which reinforces the high demand in automated software testing and analysis tools. In this paper, we showcase several dynamic program analysis applications and present our solutions. These applications include memory profiling, automated test generation using dynamic symbolic execution and automated detection of concurrency bugs in multithreaded programs. Our memory profiling tool is designed for Java applications for Android and it is implemented through Android Dalvik VM modification. This approach allowed us to overcome existing Dalvik VM limitations that make existing profiling tools based on dynamic bytecode instrumentation inaccessible. We have successfully applied our tool to several core Android applications - the results provided in the paper outline the effectiveness of the approach. The second solution we discuss in the paper - dynamic symbolic execution for test generation automation - allows us to efficiently generate test scenarios for Java program graphical user interface. The core technologies of the approach include the use of static bytecode instrumentation and automatic GUI model extraction. We implement the approach on top of a user interface test automation framework GUITAR. Finally, we present our approach to automatically identify concurrency bugs in multithreaded Java applications. The approach is based on static bytecode instrumentation for trace generation and employs ThreadSanitizer defect detection tool for identifying bugs.

Actor profiling in virtual execution environments

Nowadays, many virtual execution environments benefit from concurrency offered by the actor model. Unfortunately, while actors are used in many applications, existing profiling tools are not much effective in analyzing the performance of applications using actors. In this paper, we present a new instrumentation-based technique to profile actors in virtual execution environments. Our technique adopts platform-independent profiling metrics that minimize the perturbations induced by the instrumentation logic and allow comparing profiling results across different platforms. In particular, our technique measures the initialization cost, the amount of executed computations, and the messages sent and received by each actor. We implement our technique within a profiling tool for Akka actors on the Java platform. Evaluation results show that our profiling technique helps performance analysis of actor utilization and communication between actors in large-scale computing frameworks.

Reconfigurable vertical profiling framework for the android runtime system

Dalvik virtual machine in the Android system creates a profiling barrier between VM-space applications and Linux user-space libraries. It is difficult for existing profiling tools on the Android system to definitively identify whether a bottleneck occurred in the application level, the Linux user-space level, or the Linux kernel level. Information barriers exist between VM-space applications and Linux native analysis tools due to runtime virtual machines' dynamic memory allocation mechanism. Furthermore, traditional vertical profiling tools targeted for Java virtual machines cannot be simply applied on the Dalvik virtual machine due to its unique design. The proposed the Reconfigurable Vertical Profiling Framework bridges the information gap and streamlines the hardware-software co-design process for the Android runtime system.

Performance profiling of virtual machines

Profilers based on hardware performance counters are indispensable for performance debugging of complex software systems. All modern processors feature hardware performance counters, but current virtual machine monitors (VMMs) do not properly expose them to the guest operating systems. Existing profiling tools require privileged access to the VMM to profile the guest and are only available for VMMs based on paravirtualization. Diagnosing performance problems of software running in a virtualized environment is therefore quite difficult. This paper describes how to extend VMMs to support performance profiling. We present two types of profiling in a virtualized environment: guest-wide profiling and system-wide profiling. Guest-wide profiling shows the runtime behavior of a guest. The profiler runs in the guest and does not require privileged access to the VMM. System-wide profiling exposes the runtime behavior of both the VMM and any number of guests. It requires profilers both in the VMM and in those guests. Not every VMM has the right architecture to support both types of profiling. We determine the requirements for each of them, and explore the possibilities for their implementation in virtual machines using hardware assistance, paravirtualization, and binary translation. We implement both guest-wide and system-wide profiling for a VMM based on the x86 hardware virtualization extensions and system-wide profiling for a VMM based on binary translation. We demonstrate that these profilers provide good accuracy with only limited overhead.

Capturing and Analyzing the Execution Control Flow of OpenMP Applications

An important aspect of understanding the behavior of applications with respect to their performance, overhead, and scalability characteristics is knowledge of their execution control flow. High level knowledge of which functions or constructs were executed after which other constructs allows reasoning about temporal application characteristics such as cache reuse. This paper describes an approach to capture and visualize the execution control flow of OpenMP applications in a compact way. Our approach does not require a full trace of program execution events but is instead based on a straightforward extension to the summary data already collected by an existing profiling tool. In multithreaded applications each thread may define its own independent flow of control, complicating both the recording as well as the visualization of the execution dynamics. Our approach allows for the full flexibility with respect to independent threads. However, the most common usage models of OpenMP have threads operate in a largely uniform way, synchronizing frequently at sequence points and diverging only to operate on different data items in worksharing constructs. Our approach accounts for this by offering a simplified representation of the execution control flow for threads with similar behavior.

Profiling Tools for FPGA-Based Embedded Systems: Survey and Quantitative Comparison

Profiling tools are computer-aided design (CAD) tools that help in determining the computationally intensive portions in software. Embedded systems consist of hardware and software components that execute concurrently and efficiently to execute a specific task or application. Profiling tools are used by embedded system designers to choose computationally intensive functions for hardware implementation and acceleration. In this paper we review and compare various existing profiling tools for FPGA-based embedded systems. We then describe Airwolf, an FPGAbased profiling tool. We present a quantitative comparison of Airwolf and a well known software-based profiling tool, GNU gprof. Four software benchmarks were used to obtain profiling results using Airwolf and gprof. We show that Airwolf provides up to 66.2% improvement in accuracy of profiled results and reduces the run time performance overhead, caused by software-based profiling tools, by up to 41.3%. The results show that Airwolf provides accurate profiling results with minimal overhead and it can help the designers of FPGA-based embedded systems in identifying the computationally intensive portions of software code for hardware implementation and acceleration.