Modified Pin Tool for Memory Trace Generation

This repo includes a modified Pin-3.31 tool (the "pinatrace") for per-core memory trace generation for any linux executable. The pin tool can support tracing the DRAM-level memory request generated by the CPU caches in a multi-thread (up to 16 threads) application. We achieve this by integrating a cache simulator into the Intel Pin tool and added support for multi-thread traces (See pin-3.31/source/tools/SimpleExamples/pinatrace.cpp). The default setting assumes the LLC cache is partitioned to 2MB pieces, each piece work for one core (line 296).

Usage

1. Directly trace a binary:

cd pin-3.31/source/tools/SimpleExamples 
make obj-intel64/pinatrace.so
cd ../../../..
./pin-3.31/pin -t pin-3.31/source/tools/SimpleExamples/obj-intel64/pinatrace.so -- ${YOUR EXECUTABLE}

2. Attach the pin tool to a running process:

./pin-3.31/pin -pid {PID} -t pin-3.31/source/tools/SimpleExamples/obj-intel64/pinatrace.so

The traces will be generated as a set of compressed files pinatrace.out.{X}, where X is the core number.

Trace Format and Processing

You need to use the parser to parse the raw data (using the parse.c). It can analyze the footprint of the trace or uncompress it and generate .txt files.

make
./parse {thread_num} {1,0}        # 1: only generate footprint, 0: also output uncompressed trace files

The parse.py can be used to scale the timestamp of the memory trace, since the PIN instrumentation will slowdown the program by a lot. For example, the program bfs normally takes 1 second to finish. But when tracing using the Pin tool, it takes 20 seconds. You can use the parse.py to repair the timestamp of the trace files:

python parse.py -t {thread_num} -s SCALE
// python parse.py -t 1 -s 20     (For example)

The format of trace is:

struct TraceSample
{
    uint64_t ns;
    uint64_t addr;
    uint8_t r;    //read or write
    uint8_t size;
} __attribute((__packed__));

The uncompressed file can look like this:

LD 132340325809728
LD 132340325812928
LD 132340325813056
LD 132340325812992
LD 132340325813632
LD 132340325809792
LD 132340325809856
LD 132340325813312
LD 132340325809920
ST 132340325813184