Bridging the Gap Between Hardware and Software Tracing
summary
Shows concrete hardware trace work: ARM ETM/Coresight and Freescale Nexus→CTF converter integration with LTTng, including a working demo that captures a 512-count run and a crash snapshot that merges hardware buffers with LTTng UST user events. Reports limitations: internal trace buffers as small as 32KB, timestamp synchronization challenges, and only partial upstream ETM support. Plans include a Nexus decoder release, CLI control for hardware tracing and Eclipse visualization.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:39Content
- 2:19What is hardware tracing? Hardware component(s) used to traces instructions and data movement of a processing device
- 4:55Hardware tracing support • ARM
- 6:32Hardware tracing vs. software tracing - Software tracing - Static instrumentation or dynamic code patching
- 7:40Why hardware tracing is useful Profiling - Very fine granularity profiling
- 9:05Why hardware tracing is useful cont.
- 10:31ARM Coresight . Coresight
- 12:29State of Coresight & ETM in Linux • ETM tracer implementation available in Linux - Seems to work only on specific hardware
- 14:02Freescale QorIQ • PowerPC based platform targeted for high-performance communications usage
- 14:44Nexus standard • ISO standard for debugging embedded systems (IEEE- ISTO-5001-2003)
- 15:11Nexus standard level
- 16:31Nexus standard format Packet based output format
- 18:18State of Nexus in Linux Nexus qoriq-debug kernel module
- 18:48Nexus debugfs
- 19:27State of Nexus in Linux Nexus decoder availability
- 20:18Tracers
- 21:57Hardware tracing support • Initial attempt to support hardware tracing: - Babeltrace Nexus to CTF converter (5) - Goal: Leverage existing traces visualizer
- 26:39Conclusion
- 27:19Questions?
