ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
The design and implementation of a log-structured file system
SOSP '91 Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
International Journal of Computer Vision
Using latency to evaluate interactive system performance
OSDI '96 Proceedings of the second USENIX symposium on Operating systems design and implementation
Lazy receiver processing (LRP): a network subsystem architecture for server systems
OSDI '96 Proceedings of the second USENIX symposium on Operating systems design and implementation
Continuous profiling: where have all the cycles gone?
Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
A comparison of Windows driver model latency performance on Windows NT and Windows 98
OSDI '99 Proceedings of the third symposium on Operating systems design and implementation
An introduction to econophysics: correlations and complexity in finance
An introduction to econophysics: correlations and complexity in finance
A scalable cross-platform infrastructure for application performance tuning using hardware counters
Proceedings of the 2000 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Information and control in gray-box systems
SOSP '01 Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Exploiting Gray-Box Knowledge of Buffer-Cache Management
ATEC '02 Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Gprof: A call graph execution profiler
SIGPLAN '82 Proceedings of the 1982 SIGPLAN symposium on Compiler construction
HOTOS '99 Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
A Metric for Distributions with Applications to Image Databases
ICCV '98 Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computer Vision
Performance debugging for distributed systems of black boxes
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
New NFS Tracing Tools and Techniques for System Analysis
LISA '03 Proceedings of the 17th USENIX conference on System administration
Adding Secure Deletion to Your Favorite File System
SISW '05 Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Security in Storage Workshop
Analysis and evolution of journaling file systems
ATEC '05 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Making the "box" transparent: system call performance as a first-class result
ATEC '04 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Dynamic instrumentation of production systems
ATEC '04 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Path-based faliure and evolution management
NSDI'04 Proceedings of the 1st conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 1
FiST: a language for stackable file systems
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Lockmeter: highly-informative instrumentation for spin locks in the linux® kernel
ALS'00 Proceedings of the 4th annual Linux Showcase & Conference - Volume 4
Detours: binary interception of Win32 functions
WINSYM'99 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on USENIX Windows NT Symposium - Volume 3
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Storage security and survivability
GreenFS: making enterprise computers greener by protecting them better
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008
A nine year study of file system and storage benchmarking
ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
DARC: dynamic analysis of root causes of latency distributions
SIGMETRICS '08 Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
DIADS: addressing the "my-problem-or-yours" syndrome with integrated SAN and database diagnosis
FAST '09 Proccedings of the 7th conference on File and storage technologies
Reference-driven performance anomaly identification
Proceedings of the eleventh international joint conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Haifa Experimental Systems Conference
Optimizing energy and performance for server-class file system workloads
ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
Evaluating performance and energy in file system server workloads
FAST'10 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on File and storage technologies
Benchmarking file system benchmarking: it *IS* rocket science
HotOS'13 Proceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on Hot topics in operating systems
Uncovering CPU load balancing policies with harmony
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers
REEF: retainable evaluator execution framework
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
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Operating systems are complex and their behavior depends on many factors. Source code, if available, does not directly help one to understand the OS's behavior, as the behavior depends on actual workloads and external inputs. Runtime profiling is a key technique to prove new concepts, debug problems, and optimize performance. Unfortunately, existing profiling methods are lacking in important areas---they do not provide enough information about the OS's behavior, they require OS modification and therefore are not portable, or they incur high overheads thus perturbing the profiled OS. We developed OSprof: a versatile, portable, and efficient OS profiling method based on latency distributions analysis. OSprof automatically selects important profiles for subsequent visual analysis. We have demonstrated that a suitable workload can be used to profile virtually any OS component. OSprof is portable because it can intercept operations and measure OS behavior from user-level or from inside the kernel without requiring source code. OSprof has typical CPU time overheads below 4%. In this paper we describe our techniques and demonstrate their usefulness through a series of profiles conducted on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows, including client/server scenarios. We discovered and investigated a number of interesting interactions, including scheduler behavior, multi-modal I/O distributions, and a previously unknown lock contention, which we fixed.