Reading
Today we read two papers about profiling and performance debugging in systems. The first paper, though not frequently cited, is an excellent example of a debugging narrative. The second paper’s an award winner.
-
“Making the ‘Box’ Transparent: System call performance as a first-class result”, Yaoping Ruan, Vivek Pai (USENIX ATC 2004)
-
“Coz: Finding code that counts with causal profiling”, Charlie Curtsinger, Emery D. Berger (ACM SOSP 2015)
Reading questions
“Making the ‘Box’ Transparent” describes how to make system call performance visible to developers; Coz runs performance experiments automatically. Could Coz use information exposed by the kernel as by DeBox? How, or why not?