DEP: Detailed execution profile

Abstract

In many areas of computer architecture design and program development, the knowledge of dynamic program behavior can be very handy. Several challenges beset the accurate and complete collection of dynamic control flow and memory reference information. These include scalability issues, runtime-overhead, and code coverage. For example, while Tallam and Gupta's work on extending WPP (Whole Program Paths) showed good compressibility, their profile requires 500MBytes of intermediate memory space and an average of 23 times slowdown to be collected. To address these challenges, this paper presents DEP (Detailed Execution Profile). DEP captures the complete dynamic control flow, data dependency and memory reference of a whole program's execution. The profile size is significantly reduced due to the insight that most information can be recovered from a tightly coupled record of control flow and register value changes. DEP is collected in an infrastructure called Adept (A dynamic execution profiling tool), which uses the DynamoRIO binary instrumentation framework to insert profile-collecting instructions within the running application. DEP profiles user-level code execution in its entirety, including interprocedural paths and the execution of multiple threads. The framework for collecting DEP has been tested on real, large and commercial applications. Our experiments show that DEP of Linux SPECInt 2000 benchmarks and Windows SysMark benchmarks can be collected with an average of 5 times slowdown while maintaining competitive compressibility. DEP's profile sizes are about 60% that of traditional profiles. Copyright 2006 ACM.