Owl: next generation system monitoring

摘要: As microarchitectural and system complexity grows, comprehending behavior becomes increasingly difficult, often requires obtaining sifting through voluminous event traces or coordinating results from multiple, non-localized sources. Owl is a proposed framework that overcomes limitations faced by traditional performance counters monitoring facilities in dealing with such pervasively deploying programmable elements throughout system. The design exploits reconfigurable logic to realize hardware monitors located at sources, as memory buses. These run writeback autonomously respect the CPU, mitigating impact of interrupt-driven need communicate irrelevant events higher levels are designed snoop any kind transaction, e.g., within core, on bus, across wire, I/O devices