Portable, Continuous Recording of Complete Computer Behavior With Low Overhead

Introduction Traditional benchmarks such as SPEC model a simple workload: a single address space, a single thread of control, no input beyond an initial data set, and little if any use of system routines. Increasingly common computer usage includes multiprogrammed environments, interactivity, and multiprocessor machines. Workloads that represent these environments have significantly different characteristics than single-process batch workloads [1]. Computer architects often rely on measurements of existing systems to drive studies of system performance. These measurements are gathered by behavior monitoring systems and might include information such as execution profiles, address traces, and instruction traces. Existing behavior monitoring techniques encounter difficulty when applied to the task of gathering information about execution behavior of complex workloads on a variety of computers. Hardware techniques often cause little, if any, disturbance of the system, but lack b