Improving the energy efficiency of hardware-assisted watchpoint systems

Authors:
Vasileios Karakostas;Sasa Tomic;Osman Unsal;Mario Nemirovsky;Adrian Cristal
Affiliations:
Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya;Barcelona Supercomputing Center;Barcelona Supercomputing Center;Barcelona Supercomputing Center;Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Spanish National Research Council (IIIA-CSIC)
Venue:
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Design Automation Conference
Year:
2013

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Abstract

Hardware-assisted watchpoint systems enhance the execution of numerous dynamic software techniques, such as memory protection, module isolation, deterministic execution, and data race detection. In this paper, we show that previous hardware proposals may introduce significant energy overheads, and propose WatchPoint Filtering (WPF), a novel filtering mechanism that eliminates unnecessary watchpoint checks. We evaluate WPF on two state-of-the-art proposals for hardware-assisted watchpoints using two common memory checkers. WPF eliminates 83% of the watchpoint checks (up to 99.7%) and reduces 57% of the dynamic energy overhead (up to 78%) on average, without introducing additional performance execution overhead.