Operating System Profiling via Latency Analysis

Operating systems are complex and their behavior depends on many factors. Source code, if available, does not directly help one to understand the OS's behavior, as the behavior depends on actual workloads and external inputs. Runtime profiling is a key technique to prove new concepts, debug problems, and optimize performance. Unfortunately, existing profiling methods are lacking in important areas--they do not provide enough information about the OS's behavior, they require OS modification and therefore are not portable, or they incur high overheads thus perturbing the profiled OS. We developed OSprof: a versatile, portable, and efficient OS profiling method based on latency distributions analysis. OSprof automatically selects important profiles for subsequent visual analysis. We have demonstrated that a suitable workload can be used to profile virtually any OS component. OSprof is portable because it can intercept operations and measure OS behavior from user-level or from i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Nikolai Joukov, Avishay Traeger, Rakesh Iyer, Charles P. Wright, Erez Zadok
• Keywords: Multi-modal I/o Distributions, Operating System, OSDI 2006, Typical Cpu Time, Unknown Lock Contention