Instruction Trace

operating-systems

Definition

Instruction Trace

An instruction trace is the actual sequence of machine code instructions executed by the processor for a given process. It captures the dynamic execution path, including branches, loops, and function calls, as opposed to the static program code.

Illusion of Parallelism

In a multitasking system, the CPU’s total trace is an interleaving of individual process traces. The dispatcher manages this interleaving to create the “illusion of parallelism” — multiple processes appear to progress simultaneously, even though only one executes at any instant on a single-core CPU.