Efficient unified tracing of kernel and user events with multi-mode stacking
AssigneeNEC Laboratories America, Inc.
InventorsJunghwan Rhee, Hui Zhang, Nipun Arora, Guofei Jiang, Kenji Yoshihira
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Abstract
The invention efficiently provides user code information for kernel level tracing approaches. It applies an advanced variation of stack walking called multi-mode stack walking to the entire system level and generates the unified trace where the user code and kernel events are integrated. The invention uses runtime stack information and internal kernel data structures. Therefore, source code for user level code and libraries are not required for inspection. The invention introduces the mechanism to narrow down the monitoring focus to specific application software and improve monitoring performance.
Claims20
A method for providing efficient unified tracing of kernel and user events with multi-mode stack walking in a software system, comprising steps of:
- receiving an input of tracing target and tracing mode information, said tracing target being a process or a thread of an application to be traced and the application's name is provided as input and tracing mode being a scheme to collect user code information which is involved with tracing performance and a storage amount for a log;
- executing kernel functions responsive to an operating system kernel execution;
- executing certain kernel functions being tracked and generating kernel events for logging by a kernel events generator;
- collecting the user code information for the certain kernel events with a multi-mode stack walking component;
- and combining the kernel events from the kernel events generator and the user code information from the multi-mode stack walking component for generating a kernel and user unified log, for the kernel events reflecting system performance bugs, the unified log enables improving debugging of code of the application because it pinpoints the corresponding user code information.
A hardware system having a processor for providing efficient unified tracing of kernel and user events with multi-mode stack walking in a software system, comprising:
- a module for receiving an input of tracing target and tracing mode information, said tracing target being a process or a thread of an application to be traced and the application's name is provided as input and tracing mode being a scheme to collect user code information which is involved with tracing performance and a storage amount for a log;
- a module for executing kernel functions responsive to an operating system kernel execution;
- a kernel events generator for executing certain kernel functions being tracked and generating kernel events for logging;
- a multi-mode stack walking component for collecting the user code information for the certain kernel events;
- and a kernel and user unified log generated by combining the kernel events from the kernel events generator and the user code information from the multi-mode stack walking component, for the kernel events reflecting system performance bugs, the unified log enables improving debugging of code of the application because it pinpoints the corresponding user code information.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.