Custom Processing Unit: Tracing and Patching Intel Atom Microcode

The ability to debug or simply observe the microarchitecture of closed-source CPUs has always been an exclusive privilege of the product vendors. For Intel CPUs, even the details of the high-level workings of CPU microcode were only available by digging into patents and not publicly documented.In this talk, we present the first systematic study of Intel Atom Microcode and a software-only framework that can observe, trace, and even patch microcode execution, shedding unprecedented light into the internal workings of Intel …

atom intel microcode patching tracing