Patent ID: 8122437

Claim:
A method for generating filtered and correlated trace information for an instruction execution stream executed on an out-of-order pipelined processor, comprising: storing each branch instruction executed by the out-of-order pipelined processor as part of an instruction trace message stream; marking one or more predetermined store instructions meeting user-specified criteria with at least a marked bit where marking one or more predetermined store instructions comprises setting a marked bit that is associated with a store instruction to identify the store instruction as an interesting data trace event within a specified address range or to identify the store instruction as an interesting data trace event according to a specified debug criteria; storing an in-order data trace message for each of the predetermined store instructions as part of a data trace message stream, where the data trace message for each predetermined store instruction comprises at least the marked bit; storing an in-order program correlation message (PCM) for each of the predetermined store instructions that is marked with at least a marked bit as part of the instruction trace message stream, where the program correlation message identifies where each predetermined store instruction occurs in the instruction execution stream, wherein each PCM is stored using a standard PCM message format; and buffering the data trace message stream and instruction trace message stream in a debug logic circuit.