Non-intrusive dynamic application profiling for multitasked applications

Application profiling - the process of monitoring an application to determine the frequency of execution within specific regions - is an essential step within the design process for many software and hardware systems. Profiling is often a critical step within hardware/software partitioning utilized to determine the critical kernels of an application. In this paper, we present a non-intrusive dynamic application profiler (DAProf) capable of profiling an executing application by monitoring the application's short backwards branches, function calls, function returns, as well as efficiently detecting context switches to provide accurate characterization of the frequently executed loops within multitasked applications. DAProf can accurately profile multiple tasks within a software application with 98.5% accuracy using as little as 10% additional area compared to an ARM9 processor.