Dimension: an instrumentation tool for virtual execution environments

ABSTRACT

Translation-based virtual execution environments (VEEs) are becoming increasingly popular because of their usefulness. With dynamic translation, a program in a VEE has two binaries: an input source binary and a dynamically generated target binary. Program analysis is important for these binaries, and both the developers and users of VEEs need an instrumentation system to customize program analysis tools. However, existing instrumentation systems for use in VEEs have two drawbacks. First, they are tightly bound with a specific VEE and thus are difficult to reuse without a lot of effort. Second, most of them can not support instrumentation on both the source and target binaries.This paper presents Dimension, a flexible tool that provides instrumentation services for a variety of VEEs. To our knowledge, it is the first stand-alone instrumentation tool that is specially designed for use in VEEs. Given an instrumentation specification, Dimension can be used by a VEE to provide customized instrumentation, enabling analyses on both the source and target binaries.We present two case studies demonstrating that Dimension can be reused easily by different VEEs. We experiment with the two cases and show that the same instrumentation provided by Dimension does not lose efficiency compared to its manual implementation for that particular VEE (the average performance difference is within 2%). We also illustrate that by interfacing with a special VEE that has the same source and target binary formats, Dimension can be used to build an efficient dynamic instrumentation system for traditional execution environments.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Code generation

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Run-time environments; Optimization; Compilers

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
dynamic translation, instrumentation, program analysis tool, virtual execution environment