Architectural support for shadow memory in multiprocessors.pdfVIP

Architectural Support for Shadow Memory in Multiprocessors Vijay Nagarajan and Rajiv Gupta University of California, CSE Department, Riverside, CA 92521 {vijay,gupta}@ Abstract Runtime monitoring support serves as a foundation for the impor- tant tasks of providing security, performing debugging, and im- proving performance of applications. Often runtime monitoring requires the maintenance of information associated with each of the application’s original memory location, which is held in cor- responding shadow memory locations. Unfortunately, existing ro- bust shadow memory implementations are inefficient. In this paper, we present a shadow memory implementation that is both efficient and robust. A combination of architectural support (in the form of ISA support and augmentations to the cache coherency protocol) and operating system support (in the form of coupled allocation of memory pages used by the application and associated shadow memory pages) is proposed. By coupling the coherency of shadow memory with the coherency of the main memory, we ensure that the shadow memory instructions execute atomically with their cor- responding original memory instructions. Our page allocation pol- icy enables fast translation of original addresses into correspond- ing shadow memory addresses; thus allowing implicit addressing of shadow memory. This approach obviates the need for page table entries for shadow pages. Our experiments show that the overheads of runtime monitoring tasks are significantly reduced in compari- son to previous software implementations. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.5 [Software Engineer- ing]: Testing and Debugging – debugging aids, monitors General Terms Design, Reliability, Performance, Experimenta- tion Keywords Shadow Memory, Coupled coherence 1. Introduction There has been significant research on the online monitoring of run- ning programs using software techniques for a variety of purposes. For example, LIFT (Qin et al. 2006) and Taint-Ch