FPGA-based software profiler for Hardware/Software co-design

Embedded systems are a mixture of software running on a microprocessor and application-specific hardware. Hardware-software codesign requires an appropriate profiler to detect the functions that contribute to a large percentage of program execution. Software based profiling tools, such as the well-known GNU gprof profiler, integrates an extra code with the software program to be profiled causing a significant performance overhead. To address this issue, this paper proposes a software profiler called AddressTracer. This profiler is an adaptation of a nonintrusive, real-time profiler called SnoopP. The AddressTracer is accurately able to evaluate the performance matrices of any specific software function. A software benchmark, secure hash algorithm (SHA), is profiled using AddressTracer and other software profiling tools, Airwolf, and GNU software profiling tool (gprof), for a quantitative comparison and their performance overhead are studied. The achieved results show that AddressTracer provides accurate profiling results with no performance overhead. Airwolf causes a very low remarkable performance overhead compared with that incurred by gprof.