System and method for providing virtual machine diagnostic information using a flight recorder functionality

摘要

A system and method for providing virtual machine diagnostic information. In accordance with an embodiment, a “flight recorder”, for use with a virtual machine, such as a Java virtual machine (JVM), allows a system administrator, software developer or other user experiencing a system problem to “go back in time” and analyze what happened right before a particular problem occurred in their system, and/or obtain an extremely detailed level of profiling without impacting system performance. The flight recorder does this by being tightly integrated into the core of the JVM itself, and by being very conscious of its performance overhead. This allows the flight recorder to provide a large amount of information on the inner workings of the JVM, and on Java programs running in the JVM.

主权项

1. A system for providing virtual machine diagnostic information, comprising:
a computing or virtual execution environment which includes one or more computers having one or more microprocessor, and a virtual machine, for use in executing one or more software applications; and a flight recorder engine provided in the virtual machine that operates with the virtual machine to
record recognized events as event data regarding the operation of the virtual machine and the applications executing thereon, wherein, as recognized events are received at the flight recorder engine, initially the flight recorder engine records event data in the virtual machine's thread-local buffers, and then, when a thread-local buffer has been filled, transfers the event data to a global buffer, andprovide the event data from the global buffer as a coordinated ordered stream of data, for use in determining or analyzing virtual machine or application problems.