International Business Machines Corporation

Thomas Julian

Arthur L Levin

John H Eilert

The disclosure provides an embedded hardware/software monitor for a data processing system. It embeds and distributes a plurality of instrumentation table units (ITUs) within various hardware entities in the system to collect sampled hardware signals local in the hardware entity in which the respective ITU is embedded, e.g. in each CPU, I/O processor, system controller, main storage controller, etc. Instrumentation measurement is controlled centrally in the system. Sampling of the system signals is done periodically at a low-rate relative to the CPU machine cycle rate, and the sampled signal are collected in the ITUs for instrumentation analysis. Sampling pulses are synchronously provided in all ITUs in the system. The ITU collected hardware signals are related to software controlled trace entries made in a trace table (TT) in main storage by each CPU in the system executing tracing and other predetermined instructions. An asynchronous relationship between the TT entries and the ITU entries is bridged by the intervening table, called SAT, located in storage. The SAT entries receive time-of-day (TOD) values also found in associated TT entries to relate them.

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Poughkeepsie, NY, United States of America

Thomas Julian