Ratified N-Trace Specifications - an Overview

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" summary

Three ratified specs define a complete RISC-V trace stack: RISC-V N-Trace (Nexus based) for message formats and compression hooks, a Trace Control Specification with 4KB-per-component registers and no auto-discovery, and a Trace Connectors Specification for industry connectors and off-chip egress. A reference C encoder/decoder on GitHub is available. Benchmarks show about 0.2 bits per instruction average, with return-stack and repeat-detection giving up to ~78% gain on call‑heavy workloads and ~20–25 Mb/s per 1 GHz core.

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" chapters (8)

1. 0:00Introduction to N-Trace
2. 1:05Ratified N-Trace specifications
3. 2:52Trace control spec details
4. 6:19ENT trace format overview
5. 10:54Compression techniques in N-Trace
6. 13:21Compression results and benchmarks
7. 16:55Future work and upcoming features
8. 19:02Ratification status and acknowledgments

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