Obtaining Dynamic Program Information with Binary Instrumentation

Dynamic information about a program has many uses, such as aiding the programmer in debugging or optimizing his code, helping make code more secure, or helping hardware and systems designers make organizational or tradeoff decisions. Program information is available through a variety of approaches, including visual inspection of the code or its output, compiler output, hardware counters, debuggers, and program instrumentation through a number of techniques. This work contains a survey of several approaches for obtaining program information and uses the findings to argue that Binary Instrumentation allows efficient access to information that is not available from any other technique. This paper examines a series of binary instrumentation toolkits that are able to instrument a static executable or a running executable, through code patching and Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation. Here is also discussed the various advantages of these tools over one another in terms of efficiency, transparency, and portability.