Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2013: Bridging the Gap Between Hardware and Software Tracing
Christian Babeux on 24 October 2013
For a numbers of years, silicon vendors have been providing hardware tracing facilities to embedded developers. By using these, developers can resolve performance and latency issues more quickly, resulting in shorter time to market. In this talk, we will cover the hardware based tracing facilities offered by various manufacturers and see how they differ from their software counterparts with respect to their instrumentation capabilities, transport mechanisms, output formats, etc. We will also show how joint hardware and software tracing can be used by developers to gain deeper insights in their applications’ behaviour. Finally, we will outline the on-going work within the Linux Trace Toolkit next generation (LTTng) project to enhance hardware tracing support and tracing data visualization.