10–14 Jun 2025
University of Ottawa
Canada/Eastern timezone

Hardware-accelerated program tracing on FreeBSD

14 Jun 2025, 09:45
50m
DMS 1120

DMS 1120

Lecture 50 min Development Talks: Room 1120

Speaker

Bojan Novković (FreeBSD)

Description

Hardware-accelerated program tracing on FreeBSD

Hardware tracing facilities are designed to capture various metrics and information about software execution with a minimal performance overhead, making them a valuable tool for performance analyses and debugging. FreeBSD recently gained a new in-kernel framework for hardware-accelerated tracing technologies (hwt(8) [1]) with support for ARM64 and Intel CPUs.

This talk will cover the work that went into adding support for Intel's Processor Trace technology in hwt(8). We'll start by covering several key concepts related to hardware-accelerated tracing and use them to explore the architecture of FreeBSD's hwt(8) framework. We'll then move on to a case study of Intel Processor Trace technology, giving a brief overview of its features before diving into key implementation details. The talk will also include a short demo of hwt(8)'s features on the Intel platform.

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/hwt

One-line summary Hardware-accelerated program tracing on FreeBSD - exploring hwt(8) and Intel PT

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