The design and implementation of FIT: a flexible instrumentation toolkit

ABSTRACT

This paper presents FIT, a Flexible open-source binary code Instrumentation Toolkit. Unlike existing tools, FIT is truly portable, with existing backends for the Alpha, x86 and ARM architectures and the Tru64Unix, Linux and ARM Firmware execution environments. This paper focuses on some of the problems that needed to be addressed for providing this degree of portability. It also discusses the trade-off between instrumentation precision and low overhead.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Measurement techniques

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Tracing; Diagnostics
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Code generation; Compilers

General Terms:
Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
code compaction, performance code abstraction