Application specific component-service-aware trace generation on Android-QEMU

Abstract

Programmers depend on virtual platforms, such as Android-QEMU, to build and test their applications as well as system software for the ease of development efforts. It is easy to add tracing modules to the virtual platforms to dump the execution trace of the guest system, which can then be used to estimate and evaluate the performance of alternative system designs. However, tracing in virtual platforms are performed at the architecture level, which makes it difficult to generate traces for specific applications due to the lack of high-level software information. This problem becomes even more challenging for Android systems, which use component-based design strategies, where applications request services from other components. In this paper, we propose a novel Android-QEMU tracing system, which follows the invocations among the service components, generates component-service-aware traces only for specific applications. The evaluation results show that the proposed system improves 152% in simulation time and saves 33% of storage space in average compared to the static QEMU-Tracer.