MemTracker: Efficient and Programmable Support for Memory Access Monitoring and Debugging

Memory bugs are a broad class of bugs that is becoming increasingly common with increasing software complexity, and many of these bugs are also security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, existing software and even hardware approaches for finding and identifying memory bugs have considerable performance overheads, target only a narrow class of bugs, are costly to implement, or use computational resources inefficiently. This paper describes MemTracker, a new hardware support mechanism that can be configured to perform different kinds of memory access monitoring tasks. MemTracker associates each word of data in memory with a few bits of state, and uses a programmable state transition table to react to different events that can affect this state. The number of state bits per word, the events to which MemTracker reacts, and the transition table are all fully programmable. MemTracker's rich set of states, events, and transitions can be used to implement different monitoring and debugging...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Guru Venkataramani, Brandyn Roemer, Yan Solihin, Milos Prvulovic
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, HPCA 2007, Memory Bugs, Performance Overheads, Such Low Overheads