The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 17, 1999
Filed:
Nov. 10, 1997
Chester Charles John, Jr, Round Rock, TX (US);
Robert J Urquhart, Austin, TX (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
The present invention is directed to a system and method for tracing operations in an information handling system without changing the operating system code. Certain machine registers are shadowed during critical machine state transitions (e.g., taking and returning from interrupts), so that the tracing program does not lose control of the system. The system is interrupted before each instruction is executed, and a tracing program determines if a change in program flow has occurred. If a change in program flow has occured, a record is written to a trace log. The record contains the number of consecutive instructions executed before the program flow change, along with a displacement field indicating the number of bytes from the end of the record to the beginning of the next record. Executed instructions are also embedded in the trace log, allowing for high compression ratios and less complex post-processing of the trace data.