Hi, love the article. You mention in the article that a hardware mechanism for tracing should exist -- have you investigated the intel_pt (processor trace) extension? I believe this uses hardware buffers and supports timestamping & cycle counters (at somewhat larger than instruction granularity sadly, although it might issue forced stamps at on branches, not sure).
You can also use the PTWRITE instruction to attach metadata to the stream which seems very powerful.
You can also use the PTWRITE instruction to attach metadata to the stream which seems very powerful.
Hope we can see such an extension on AMD as well.