Software developers today have to cope with increasingly complex software systems that defy the capability of any one engineer to fully understand. Modern Linux® and Android based system designs incorporate tens of millions of lines of code before the first actual product application has been added. Understanding the technical interaction between multiple applications and the operating system is complex. Tracking down anything other than simplistic logic faults and crashes can be nearly impossible using “stop and stare” debugging techniques that utilize breakpoints alone.
Increasingly developers are turning to “tracing” techniques to help address these debugging and performance optimization challenges. Developers have been utilizing simple trace data sources such as application logs for many years. Some processor cores have supported hardware-centric trace data collection that can provide logs of processor branches and instruction execution.
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