by Aaron Spear, VMware
Modern multi-core designs often aggregate wildly different hardware and software technologies. Traditional debuggers, which show a snapshot of a portion of the system, do little to uncover issues that arise due to complex interaction of components.

Engineers routinely cobble together proprietary tracing facilities in order to have some chance of catching hard to find defects. What is needed to debug these diverse systems is an approach that can analyze trace data coming from many different collection technologies.

In this paper we outline current multi-core development trends, explore the deficiencies in traditional software development tooling when applied to multi-core systems. We will also introduce the “Common Trace Format” (CTF), a coming standard for tracing multi-core systems over time.

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