Improving the energy efficiency of hardware-assisted watchpoint systems
Authors: 
Vasileios Karakostas, Sasa Tomic, Osman Unsal, Mario Nemirovsky, Adrian CristalAuthors Info & Claims
Vasileios Karakostas, Sasa Tomic, Osman Unsal, Mario Nemirovsky, Adrian CristalAuthors Info & ClaimsArticle No.: 54, Pages 1 - 6
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.
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Index Terms
- Improving the energy efficiency of hardware-assisted watchpoint systems
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Published In
May 2013
1285 pages
ISBN:9781450320719
DOI:10.1145/2463209
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Published: 29 May 2013
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