Feather-Trace: A Light-Weight Event Tracing Toolkit
Bjoern B. Brandenburg and James H. Anderson
Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time applications (OSPERT 2007)
Pisa, Italy, July 3, 2007
Summary
We present a light-weight event tracing toolkit for real-time operating systems on the Intel x86 platform. Our approach is wait-free, multiprocessor-safe, and introduces very low overhead. The decision as to whether an event is enabled is reached by executing a single unconditional jump instruction. As a case study, we trace the locking behavior of the Linux kernel. Our results provide strong support for the wide-spread assumption that short non-nested critical sections are the common case in practice.