Abstract: Code profiling is a key technique for application behavior analysis and bottlenecks discovery. According to the requirement of designing custom instructions for reconfigurable processors, AID-prof, a novel profiling method based on virtual machine was presented. The benefits of the presented method are architecture-independent and close combination between static and dynamic analysis. Based on AID-prof, an automatic custom instructions identification procedure named CID was proposed. Experiments results show that AID-prof can discover application hot spots effectively, and custom instructions identified by CID can markedly speed up application execution.

Key words: Reconfigurable processors, Custom instructions, Identification, Code profiling, Virtual machine