Research And Implementation Of The IA-64 Linux Kernel Trace Mechanism

Linux has become more and more popular because it is a free and open source operating system. With the architecture of IA-64 applied widely on high-ends servers, and the outspread of applications developing and porting based on IA-64, people nowadays have an increasing demand on performance improvement. It leads to much research in the development of tools used to improve the performance of OS. It is important to capture events stream and attain details about system activity. So, the research of kernel trace mechanism is imperative under the situation.In this paper, we analyze the basic principle of operating system trace mechanism and study related key technology of implementation. We also focus on some important factors, such as the probe mechanism of trace, events definition and its function, data analysis.This paper presents a base frame of kernel trace mechanism of IA-64 Linux based on current research and describes its implementation in detail. LKTM provides its user with all the exact information which is required to reconstruct a system's behavior during a certain period of time. And it also offers a convenient graphical display and analysis tool with which users can know exactly the dynamic behavior of a system. Furthermore, we analyze its performance. The result shows that LKTM is still a low overheadmonitoring tool. It has little effect on system performance.Finally, we summarize our main works and introduce our research works in the future.