Versatile, Portable, and Efficient OS Profiling via Latency Analysis

Operating systems are complex and their behavior depends on many factors. Source code, if available, does not directly help understand the OS’s behavior, as the behavior depends on actual workloads and external inputs. Runtime profiling is a key technique for understanding the behavior and mutual-influence of modern OS components. Such profiling is useful to prove new concepts, debug problems, and optimize the performance of existing OSs. Unfortunately, existing profiling methods lack in important areas: they do not provide much of the necessary information about the OS’s behavior; they require OS modification and therefore are not portable; or they exact high overheads thus perturbing the profiled OS. The latency of any OS operation contains important information about its execution. Latency can be easily collected but cannot be easily analyzed; it contains a mix of latencies of differen