Abstract - Technical Program - OSDI 99
Fine-Grained Dynamic Instrumentation of Commodity Operating System Kernels
Ariel Tamches, Barton P. Miller
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Abstract
We have developed a technology, fine-grained dynamic instrumentation
of commodity kernels, which can splice (insert) dynamically generated
code before almost any machine code instruction of a completely
unmodified running commodity operating system kernel. This technology
is well-suited to performance profiling, debugging, code coverage,
security auditing, runtime code optimizations, and kernel extensions.
We have designed and implemented a tool called KernInst that performs
dynamic instrumentation on a stock production Solaris kernel running
on an UltraSPARC. On top of KernInst, we have implemented a kernel
performance profiling tool, and used it to understand kernel and
application performance under a Web proxy server workload. We used
this information to make two changes (one to the kernel, one to the
proxy) that cumulatively reduce the percentage of elapsed time that
the proxy spends opening disk cache files from 40% to 7%.
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