An embedded operating system API for monitoring hardware events in multicore processors

Abstract—This paper presents an operating system API for monitoring hardware events specifically designed for embedded systems that use multicore processors. The proposed API uses the concepts from the Application-Driven Embedded System Design (ADESD) to construct a simple and lightweight interface for handling the complexity of today’s Performance Monitoring Units (PMUs). In order to demonstrate the API usage, we monitored an event associated with bus snoops in a real processor. Based on the experience learned, we propose a set of guidelines, such as features for monitoring address space intervals and OS trap generation, that can help hardware designers to improve the PMU capabilities in the future, considering the embedded operating system’s point of view. Keywords-Hardware performance counters, embedded systems, operating system, multicore architectures I