Mechanism for measuring the service times of software and hardware components in complex systems.

摘要

A measurement mechanism which can be implemented in any complex system for measuring the service times required for carrying out specified operations, the system comprising a plurality of components and working in pre-emptive mode so that an operation once started by a component can be suspended to perform other operations which are requested by the same or other components if these operations have higher priority levels. It comprises a current status register 16 in which the system stores a status value representative of the current operation being performed by the system and a reference status register 18 in which a reference value representative of the operation to be measured, is stored. These values are compared through compare logic circuit 24 under control of a filtering value stored in register 20. When a match is detected by circuit 24 the content of counter 40 is incremented. At the end of the measure the content of counter 40 is transferred into register 44 the content of which represents the measured value. By selecting the filtering value any specified partial or total service time can be directly measured.