DevTrace: Lightweight Plug-In Design for PCIe Transaction Tracing in Edge Intelligence Workloads

Zhibai Huang, Kailiang Xu, Zhixiang Wei, Yinghao Deng, Chen Chen, Yun Wang, Fangxin Liu, Mingyuan Xia, Zhengwei Qi

Abstract: The complexity of host-peripheral interactions during high-load tasks poses significant challenges for system optimization, with existing tracing tools degrading performance by up to 5.39×. We introduce DevTrace, a novel low-overhead tracing framework for peripheral interactions. Its modular architecture separates data collection from kernel-level operations, enabling lightweight tracing with minimal driver modifications across entire classes of devices. By eliminating heavy kernel tracing interrupts, DevTrace reduces overhead to negligible levels while maintaining data accuracy. In edge-based intelligence deployments, DevTrace achieves a 128× reduction in memory usage and approximately 10× lower CPU overhead compared to page-fault-based solutions. It significantly reduces data loss and performance degradation under high-load conditions, establishing it as a reliable tool for analyzing host-peripheral interactions and optimizing performance in resource-constrained environments. We also discuss potential extensions to eBPF to further decouple tracing from driver frameworks.

External IDs:dblp:conf/iccad/HuangXWDCWLXQ25