Gleipnir: A memory tracing and profiling tool

Embedded and high performance applications often require fine-tuning to improve their performance. This is achieved using analysis tools that provide insights into the application’s behavior. A common approach is to instrument the application code and observe its behavior during an actual execution on a target system. In this paper we describe a program profiling and tracing tool called Gleipnir. Gleipnir is built as a plug-in tool to a widely used binary instru-mentation framework called Valgrind. Gleipnir can be used to trace memory accesses and associate each access with a specific program internal structure such as threads, functions, local, global, and dynamic data structures, and scalar variables.This ability makes Gleipnir a good candidate for advanced memory performance tuning. The data provided by Gleipnir may be used by trace-driven simulators, such as cache simulators to analyze accesses to data structure elements s