VSCOPE: Programmable Dynamic Instrumentation for SOC Analysis

• Main Authors: Yi-Tsang Hsieh, 謝佾蒼
• Other Authors: Tien-Fu Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/87949947300790889178

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 資訊工程所 === 96 === We have proposed a novel plugin implementation for virtual platform, which is called VSCOPE. The plugin uses dynamic instrumentation as its core technique. Users may use the APIs provided by VSCOPE to program his/her code to inspect programs running on the virtual platform. VSCOPE provides both software and hardware inspection mechanism, both these instrumentation strategies are mapped to program counter(PC), therefore reduced the performance overhead caused by dynamic instrumentation. In software inspection, VSCOPE provides three granularities including basic instruction, basic block, and procedure call, by using these APIs, user may create his/her own soc design utilities, e.q. hotspot detector, call graph generator for generic applications or discrete cosine transform function replacement for specific application, i.e. jpeg decoder. In hardware inspection, VSCOPE provide user call back function directly hook on IP related load and store instrction. The original thoughts of software parts are from PIN [21, 37, 17], which is a x86 dynamic instrumentation system, we made most of PIN''s functionalities available on virtual platform and expend its features to hardware, further more, we remain 94% performance after dynamic instrumentation, while PIN remains 24% in average performance. In short, we provide a flexible inspection environment on virtual platform for user to create SOC analysis tools at their will, in early stage platform development and evaluation, VSCOPE provides low overhead inspection capability on both software and hardware.