Computer Science and Engineering, Department of
Date of this Version
2010
Citation
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Technical Report, TR-UNL-CSE-2010-0010
Abstract
One problem with using component-based software development approach is that once software modules are reused over generations of products, they form legacy structures that can be challenging to understand, making validating these systems difficult. As such, tools and methodologies that enable engineers to see interactions of these software modules will enhance their ability to make these software systems more dependable. To address this need, we propose SimSight, a framework to capture dynamic call graphs in Simics, which is a widely adopted commercial full-system simulator. Simics is a software system that simulates complete computer systems. As such, it performs nearly identical tasks to a real system but at a much lower speed while providing greater execution observability. We have implemented SimSight to generate dynamic call-graphs of statically and dynamically linked functions in x86/Linux environment. We then evaluate its performance using 12 integer programs from SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite.