Process Labeled Kernel Profiling: A New Facility to Profile System Activities

Profiling tools that empirically measure the resource usage of a program have been widely used in program development. These tools have traditionally focused on the behavior of the target program. The target program, however, actually performs its job in collaboration with other programs, such as servers and an operating system kernel, in a modern system environment. Process-labeled kernel profiling is a novel facility that measures and attributes the kernel resource consumption of programs benefiting from it. This facility, in conjunction with a conventional profiler, enables a programmer to grasp the resource consumption of programs from an overall system point of view. Using this information, the programmer is better able to reduce overall resource consumption.