A RISC-V Processor Design for Transparent Tracing

Code instrumentation enables the observability of an embedded software system during its execution. A usage example of code instrumentation is the estimation of “worst-case execution time” using hybrid analysis. This analysis combines static code analysis with measurements of the execution time on the deployment platform. Static analysis of source code determines where to insert the tracing instructions, so that later, the execution time can be captured using a logic analyser. The main drawback of this technique is the overhead introduced by the execution of trace instructions. This paper proposes a modification of the architecture of a RISC pipelined processor that eliminates the execution time overhead introduced by the code instrumentation. In this way, it allows the tracing to be non-intrusive, since the sequence and execution times of the program under analysis are not modified by the introduction of traces. As a use case of the proposed solution, a processor, based on RISC-V architecture, was implemented using VHDL language. The processor, synthesized on a FPGA, was used to execute and evaluate a set of examples of instrumented code generated by a “worst-case execution time” estimation tool. The results validate that the proposed architecture executes the instrumented code without overhead.