QTrace: a framework for customizable full system instrumentation

Abstract

This work presents QTrace, an open-source instrumentation extension API for QEMU (1) that can instrument unmodified applications and OS binaries for uni- and multi-processor systems. QTrace facilitates the development of custom, full-system instrumentation tools for the X86 guest architecture enabling statistics collection and program execution studies including system-level code. This paper: illustrates QTrace's API through instrumentation examples, discusses how QEMU was modified to implement QTrace, explains the validation testing procedures, shows QTrace's usefulness in comparison to a user-level binary instrumentation tool in workloads that spend significant time in the kernel, and illustrates that QTrace does not impose a significant performance penalty. Experiments show that for an instruction count plug-in, QTrace is 12.2X slower than PIN [2], a user-level only instrumentation tool, and 4.1X faster than BOCHS [3], a full-system emulator. QTrace without instrumentation performs similarly to the un-modified QEMU.