DynamoRIO is a runtime code manipulation system that supports code transformations on any part of a program, while it executes. DynamoRIO exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc. Unlike many dynamic tool systems, DynamoRIO is not limited to insertion of callouts/trampolines and allows arbitrary modifications to application instructions via a powerful IA-32/AMD64/ARM/AArch64 instruction manipulation library. DynamoRIO provides efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of unmodified applications running on stock operating systems (Windows, Linux, or Android, with experimental Mac support) and commodity IA-32, AMD64, ARM, and AArch64 hardware.

Existing DynamoRIO-based tools

DynamoRIO is the basis for some well-known external tools:

The Arm Instruction Emulator (ArmIE)
WinAFL, the Windows fuzzing tool, as an instrumentation and code coverage engine
The fine-grained profiler for ARM DrCCTProf
The portable and efficient framework for fine-grained value profilers VClinic
The sampling-based sanitizer framework GWPSan

Tools built on DynamoRIO and available in the release package include:

The memory debugging tool Dr. Memory
The tracing and analysis framework drmemtrace which can target instruction and memory address traces such as:
- Google data center workload traces for public analysis in the drmemtrace format.
The drmemtrace framework includes multiple tools that operate on both online (with multi-process support) and offline instruction and memory address traces (such as the Google data center workload traces listed above):
- The cache simulator drcachesim
- TLB simulation
- Reuse distance
- Reuse time
- Opcode mix
- Function call tracing
The legacy processor emulator drcpusim
The "strace for Windows" tool drstrace
The code coverage tool drcov
The library tracing tool drltrace
The memory address tracing tool memtrace (drmemtrace's offline traces are faster with more surrounding infrastructure, but this is a simpler starting point for customized memory address tracing)
The memory value tracing tool memval
The instruction tracing tool instrace (drmemtrace's offline traces are faster with more surrounding infrastructure, but this is a simpler starting point for customized instruction tracing)
The basic block tracing tool bbbuf
The instruction counting tool inscount
The dynamic fuzz testing tool Dr. Fuzz
The disassembly tool drdisas
And more, including opcode counts, branch instrumentation, etc.: see Sample Tools.

Building Your Own Custom Tools

DynamoRIO's powerful API abstracts away the details of the underlying infrastructure and allows the tool builder to concentrate on analyzing or modifying the application's runtime code stream. API documentation is included in the release package and can also be browsed online. Slides from our past tutorials are also available.

Downloading DynamoRIO

DynamoRIO is available free of charge as a binary package for both Windows and Linux. DynamoRIO's source code is available under a BSD license.

Obtaining Help

Use the discussion list to ask questions.

To report a bug, use the issue tracker.

Contributing

For information on how to contribute to the DynamoRIO project, see Contributing to DynamoRIO.

Origins

You can read about where the name DynamoRIO came from in the History of DynamoRIO.