Columbo: Low Level End-to-End System Traces through Modular Full-System Simulation
<|reference_start|>Columbo: Low Level End-to-End System Traces through Modular Full-System Simulation: Fully understanding performance is a growing challenge when building next-generation cloud systems. Often these systems build on next-generation hardware, and evaluation in realistic physical testbeds is out of reach. Even when physical testbeds are available, visibility into essential system aspects is a challenge in modern systems where system performance depends on often sub-$\mu s$ interactions between HW and SW components. Existing tools such as performance counters, logging, and distributed tracing provide aggregate or sampled information, but remain insufficient for understanding individual requests in-depth. In this paper, we explore a fundamentally different approach to enable in-depth understanding of cloud system behavior at the software and hardware level, with (almost) arbitrarily fine-grained visibility. Our proposal is to run cloud systems in detailed full-system simulations, configure the simulators to collect detailed events without affecting the system, and finally assemble these events into end-to-end system traces that can be analyzed by existing distributed tracing tools.<|reference_end|>
@article{görgen2024columbo:,
    title={Columbo: Low Level End-to-End System Traces through Modular Full-System
  Simulation},
    author={Jakob G"orgen, Vaastav Anand, Hejing Li, Jialin Li, Antoine Kaufmann},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.05251},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.05251},
    primaryClass={cs.PF cs.OS}
}