Hypertracing: Tracing Through Virtualization Layers

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One Line Summary

Syncless technique for tracing virtual machine on any layer (nested too)

Abstract

Tracing only inside virtual machine is not enough because VMs have the illusion of absolute control over the physical resources. Previous work used trace merging of recorded host and guest traces with synchronization techniques to bring guest’s trace timestamps back to the same timespan as the host. However, this technique introduce much higher overhead in order to get nanoseconds degree of synchronization.

Hypertracing is a syncless tracing technique, which offload guest events, that will be recorded directly using host timestamps.

We Implemented Hypertracing in ftrace infrastructure for function tracing across all virtualization layers.

Performance overhead of Hypertracing will also be presented comparing it with Lttng, Ftrace and Perf.

Tags

Synchronization, virtualization, tracing, Hypertracing

Presentation Materials

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