Summary: revEELing Solaris
Remzi Arpaci Manuel F¨ahndrich
EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720­1776
fremzi,manuelg@cs.berkeley.edu
May 13, 1996
1 Introduction
Instruction and data traces of workloads drive the design of the next generation CPU and memory systems.
Unfortunately, traces often do not include kernel code. Furthermore, traces of small programs, including
many applications found in the SPEC benchmark suite, do not show system behavior under real workloads.
Orienting designs on such traces may be harmful [SP95].
In the context of the IRAM project at Berkeley, we decided to overcome the SPEC trace dilemma and
obtain meaningful traces of ``real world'' applications, such as web browsers and personal productivity tools.
To this end, we are putting an instrumentation framework into place that allows tracing of applications
running on the Solaris 2.4 operating system.
Our methodology for collecting the traces is to extend EEL (Executable Editing Library) [LS95], a
library for building tools that analyze and modify executable programs and object files. EEL allows code
to be inserted at arbitrary points in a program, enabling other tools that insert code to gather instruction
and data address traces for on­the­fly simulations or buffering for later analysis. One of the main strengths

Source: Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi - Department of Computer Sciences, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences