Despite the emerging ubiquity of hardware monitoring mech- anisms and prior research work in other fields, the applica- bility and usefulness of hardware monitoring mechanisms have not been fully scrutinized for software engineering.

In this work, we identify several recently developed hard- ware mechanisms that lend themselves well to structural test coverage analysis and automated fault localization and ex- plore their potential. We discuss key factors impacting the applicability of hardware monitoring mechanism for these software engineering tasks, present novel online analyses lever- aging these mechanisms, and provide preliminary results demonstrating the promise of this emerging hardware.

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