Abstract

Intel Processor Trace (PT), and its older sibling RTIT, are now widely available in Intel systems, and integrated into Linux perf. PT allows efficient control flow tracing of workloads running on the CPU, while integration into the OS allows its use without special tracing hardware. This talk gives an overview of the Intel PT, how it is implemented in Linux, and how it can be used. It gives an overview on the Linux perf implementation and shows some related tools.

Audience

People interested in tracing program calls and branches using hardware tracing.

Biography

Andi Kleen is a long term Linux kernel contributor. He worked on many different areas of Linux, including networking, RAS, performance, NUMA and low level architecture. He currently works at Intel’s open source technology center on server performance and performance analysis.

Beeman Strong is a CPU architect in the Platform Engineering Group. He has been at Intel for 18 years, starting out in CPU validation on the Pentium 4. More recently he took over as lead architect for Intel® Processor Trace, and holds several patents in the area of trace and debug. He earned his BSEE from the University of Texas at Austin.