A Lightweight Dynamic Performance Monitoring Framework for Embedded Systems

Abstract

Traditional monitoring techniques are not suitable for embedded systems because they could incur significant overhead. This paper proposes a lightweight dynamic performance monitoring framework for embedded systems focusing on reducing the dynamic monitoring overhead. With the introduction of a target-host separation and cooperation model, the target (embedded) system only needs to perform minimal low-overhead tasks while most of the high-overhead tasks were migrated to the host machine. The overhead in the target embedded system is further reduced through a low-cost dynamic instrumentation mechanism with direct jump instructions.