How do I record all memory accesses of a process/file?

Question

For testing a cache system, I need the memory access (read and writes) list for a particular process. The cache code is written in verilog. My application is for media processing, however I'm open to other applications as well.. So far I have been adding address references in the C++ code for PNG decoding (available here http://lodev.org/lodepng/)...

This is quite a tedious process and I'm looking for alternatives. I've even tried hacking into benchmarks like simplescalar as well as reading crash dumps, but to no avail...

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It might be worth your time to look into Intel's Pin, so long as you're running on x86.

Their manual has an example how to use Pin to instrument a binary to generate a memory trace.

Answer 2

Take a look at https://lwn.net/Articles/257209/

One tool is Cachegrind (part of valgrind). It's slow, but can tell you exact stats about memory accesses because it simulates your entire program on a virtual processor.

Another tool is Oprofile. It's a kernel module that uses statistical sampling to get data. It's not as accurate, but much lighter weight.