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The use of microcode instrumentation for development, debugging and tuning of operating system kernels

Authors:

S. W. Melvin,

Y. N. PattAuthors Info & Claims

SIGMETRICS '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems

Pages 207 - 214

https://doi.org/10.1145/55595.55619

Published: 01 May 1988 Publication History

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Abstract

We have developed a tool based on microcode modifications to a VAX 8600 which allows a wide variety of operating system measurements to be taken with minimal perturbation and without the need to modify any operating system software. A trace of interrupts, exceptions, system calls and context switches is generated as a side-effect to normal execution. In this paper we describe the tool we have developed and present some results we have gathered under both UNIX 4.3 BSD and VAX/VMS V4.5. We compare the process fork behavior of two different command shells under UNIX, look at context switch rates for interactive and batch workloads and generate a histogram for network interrupt service time.

References

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Etsion YTsafrir DKirkpatrick SFeitelson D(2007)Fine grained kernel logging with KLoggerACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/1272998.127302341:3(259-272)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1272998.1273023
Etsion YTsafrir DKirkpatrick SFeitelson D(2007)Fine grained kernel logging with KLoggerProceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 200710.1145/1272996.1273023(259-272)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1272996.1273023
Danzig P(1994)Flow Control for Limited Buffer MulticastIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/32.26375120:1(1-12)Online publication date: 1-Jan-1994
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/32.263751
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The use of microcode instrumentation for development, debugging and tuning of operating system kernels

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Published In

SIGMETRICS '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems

May 1988

282 pages

ISBN:0897912543

DOI:10.1145/55595

Chairman:
C. U. Smith
L&S Computer Technology

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review Volume 16, Issue 1
May 1988
266 pages
ISSN:0163-5999
DOI:10.1145/1007771
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 1988

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SIGMETRICS

SIGMETRICS88: SIGMetrics '88 Conference on Measurement and Modeling of computer Systems

May 24 - 27, 1988

New Mexico, Santa Fe, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 459 of 2,691 submissions, 17%

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Cited By

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Etsion YTsafrir DKirkpatrick SFeitelson D(2007)Fine grained kernel logging with KLoggerACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/1272998.127302341:3(259-272)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1272998.1273023
Etsion YTsafrir DKirkpatrick SFeitelson D(2007)Fine grained kernel logging with KLoggerProceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 200710.1145/1272996.1273023(259-272)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1272996.1273023
Danzig P(1994)Flow Control for Limited Buffer MulticastIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/32.26375120:1(1-12)Online publication date: 1-Jan-1994
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/32.263751
Conte THwu W(1990)Benchmark characterization for experimental system evaluationTwenty-Third Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences10.1109/HICSS.1990.205094(6-18)Online publication date: 1990
https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.1990.205094
Patt Y(1990)Methodologies for experimental research in computer architecture and performance measurementTwenty-Third Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences10.1109/HICSS.1990.205093(2-5)Online publication date: 1990
https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.1990.205093

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The use of microcode instrumentation for development, debugging and tuning of operating system kernels

THE LINUX OPERATING SYSTEM: AN INTRODUCTION

Identifying sources of Operating System Jitter through fine-grained kernel instrumentation