Developing a Software Tool for Precise Kernel Measurements

Samuel Thibault (1, 2) , Robert Russell (3)

1 RUNTIME - Efficient runtime systems for parallel architectures
2 ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon
3 CS - UNH - Department of Computer Science

Tracing the flow of control in a running kernel is useful for determining where performance can be improved, for instance. FKT (Fast Kernel Tracing) is a set of tools to achieve such tracing. However, its recording size was limited to the size of available memory, lacking a flushing mechanism. We here describe how such flushing was added to FKT without too much perturbing the measurements, how new issues raised by long recordings were addressed, as well as the new features that became useful.

Mots clés: performance evaluation; kernel probing; synchronization; sendfile; sendpage; page cache; buffer cache; operating systems

Domaines: Système d'exploitation [cs.OS]

Samuel Thibault, Robert Russell. Developing a Software Tool for Precise Kernel Measurements. [Research Report] RR-5602, INRIA. 2005, pp.25. ⟨inria-00000189v2⟩