Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Dynamic probe injection is now a widely used method to debug performance in production. Current techniques for dynamic probing of native code, however, rely on an expensive stop-the-world approach: binary changes are made within a safe state of the program---typically in which all the program threads are halted---to ensure that another thread executing the modified code region doesn't step into a partially-modified code. Stop-the-world patching is not scalable. In contrast, low overhead, scalable probes that can be rapidly toggled on and off in-place would open up new use cases for statistical profilers and language implementations, even traditional ahead-of-time, native-code compilers. In this paper we introduce safe cross-modification protocols that mutate x86 code between threads but do not require quiescing threads, resulting in radically lower overheads than existing solutions. A key problem is handling instructions that straddle cache lines. We empirically evaluate existing x86 architectures to derive a safe policy given current processor behavior, and we argue that future architectures should clarify the semantics of instruction fetching to make cheap cross-modification easier and future proof. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2016 | 10.1145/2908080.2908084 | PLDI |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
dynamic instrumentation,application profiling | x86,Use case,Programming language,Computer science,Cache,Compiler,Real-time computing,Thread (computing),Machine code,Scalability,Embedded system,Debugging | Conference |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
51 | 6 | 0362-1340 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
0 | 0.34 | 10 |
Authors | ||
4 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buddhika Chamith | 1 | 3 | 1.10 |
| Bo Joel Svensson | 2 | 67 | 6.12 |
| Luke Dalessandro | 3 | 357 | 16.67 |
| Ryan Newton | 4 | 802 | 70.80 |