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:
May. 01, 2007
Filed:
Apr. 03, 2003
John Steven Dodson, Pflugerville, TX (US);
Michael Stephen Floyd, Austin, TX (US);
Jerry Don Lewis, Round Rock, TX (US);
Gary Alan Morrison, Austin, TX (US);
John Steven Dodson, Pflugerville, TX (US);
Michael Stephen Floyd, Austin, TX (US);
Jerry Don Lewis, Round Rock, TX (US);
Gary Alan Morrison, Austin, TX (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
An apparatus for performing imprecise bus tracing in a distributed memory symmetric multiprocessor system is disclosed. The apparatus includes a bus trace macro (BTM) module that can control the snoop traffic seen by one or more of the memory controllers in the data processing system and utilize a local memory attached to the memory controller for storing trace records. After the BTM module is enabled for tracing operations, the BTM module snoops transactions on the interconnect and packs information contained within these transactions into a block of data of a size that matches the write buffers within the memory controller. In addition, the BTM module also includes a dropped record counter for counting the number of address transactions that were not converted to trace records because all the write buffers were completely full. After an occurence of the write buffers full condition, a time stamp trace record is inserted before a new trace record can be written. The time stamp trace record includes a count of the number of address transactions that were not converted to trace records.