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New Sun labs Technical Report TR-159
A New Technical Report from Sun Labs
September 25, 2006- Virtual machines, such as Sun's HotSpot(TM) Java Virtual Machine(TM), are very
important in modern software. One powerful advantage of the JVM is its ability
to dynamically adapt an application's behavior to fit the machine on which it is
executing. To take advantage of that ability, and to get the most out of a
system, JVM engineers and researchers must learn how the application and virtual
machine use the underlying hardware. Similarly, hardware architects should
understand the performance characteristics of JVM-based software.
This technical report describes a tool we built to examine low-level events in a
full-system simulator, relating them to the running application and HotSpot JVM.
The tool enables research into the interactions of processors and memory systems
with the JVM and applications. For example, when a cache miss occurs, we can
find out which Java object was being touched. Or we can look at the contents of
the caches to find which objects are present. This all happens non-
disruptively, because the application, JVM and the operating system are running
on a simulated system - our observation of the system does not disturb its
state. Ours is the first system that allows such detailed low- and high-level
information to be collected, opening up new possibilities for investigation and
experimentation.
Read Technical Report now »
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