research-article

Lowering overhead in sampling-based execution monitoring and tracing

Authors:

Johnson J. Thomas,

Sebastian Fischmeister,

Deepak KumarAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 46, Issue 5

Pages 101 - 110

https://doi.org/10.1145/2016603.1967692

Published: 11 April 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Debugging is an important phase in the embedded software development cycle because of its high proportion in the overall cost in the product development. Debugging is difficult for real-time applications as such programs are time-sensitive and must meet deadlines in often a resource constrained environment.

A common approach for real-time systems is to monitor the execution instead of stepping through the program, because stepping will usually violate all deadline constraints. We consider a sampling-based approach for monitoring, because of its predictable overhead for the system compared to traditional monitoring. However, the sampling-based approach can easily have high overhead depending on the length of branches and the granularity of the monitoring effort. To reduce this overhead, we instrument the program with markers that will permit us to sample less frequently and thus reduce the overhead.

This leads to the interesting problems of (a) where to place the markers in the code and (b) how to manipulate the markers. While related work investigates the first part, in this work, we investigate the second component of the problem. We investigate different instrumentation schemes and propose two new schemes based on bitvectors that significantly reduce the overhead for sampling-based execution monitoring.

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Cited By

Mertz JNunes I(2021)Tigris: A DSL and framework for monitoring software systems at runtimeJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.110963177(110963)Online publication date: Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2021.110963
Mertz JNunes ILitoiu MClarke STei K(2019)On the practical feasibility of software monitoringProceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems10.1109/SEAMS.2019.00030(169-180)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SEAMS.2019.00030
Craun MHussain KGautam UJi ZRao TWilliams D(2024)Eliminating eBPF Tracing Overhead on Untraced ProcessesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions10.1145/3672197.3673431(16-22)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672197.3673431
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Index Terms

Lowering overhead in sampling-based execution monitoring and tracing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 5

LCTES '10

May 2011

170 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2016603

Issue’s Table of Contents

LCTES '11: Proceedings of the 2011 SIGPLAN/SIGBED conference on Languages, compilers and tools for embedded systems
April 2011
182 pages
ISBN:9781450305556
DOI:10.1145/1967677
General Chair:
Jan Vitek
Purdue University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Bjorn De Sutter
Ghent University, Belgium

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

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: 11 April 2011

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 46, Issue 5

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Cited By

Mertz JNunes I(2021)Tigris: A DSL and framework for monitoring software systems at runtimeJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.110963177(110963)Online publication date: Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2021.110963
Mertz JNunes ILitoiu MClarke STei K(2019)On the practical feasibility of software monitoringProceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems10.1109/SEAMS.2019.00030(169-180)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SEAMS.2019.00030
Craun MHussain KGautam UJi ZRao TWilliams D(2024)Eliminating eBPF Tracing Overhead on Untraced ProcessesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions10.1145/3672197.3673431(16-22)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672197.3673431
Bonakdarpour BThomas JFischmeister S(2012)Time-Triggered Program Self-MonitoringProceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications10.1109/RTCSA.2012.16(260-269)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/RTCSA.2012.16

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