Enabling Efficient Mobile Tracing with BTrace

With the growing complexity of smartphone systems, effective tracing becomes vital for enhancing their stability and optimizing the user experience. Unfortunately, existing tracing tools are inefficient in smartphone scenarios. Their distributed designs (with either per-core or per-thread buffers) prioritize performance but lead to missing crucial clues with high probability. While these problems can be overlooked in previous scenarios (e.g., servers), they drastically limit the usefulness of tracing on smartphones.

To enable efficient tracing on smartphones, we propose BTrace: a tracing tool that combines the performance benefits of per-core buffers with the capability of retaining longer continuous traces by partitioning a global buffer into multiple blocks, which are dynamically assigned to the most