Dynamic Instrumentation Tool Platform
DynamoRIO
CGO 2017 Tutorial: Building Dynamic Tools with DynamoRIO on x86 and ARMv8

Sunday morning, February 5, 2017 at the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization.

Audience

Researchers and professionals interested in building dynamic program analysis tools.

Abstract

This tutorial will present the DynamoRIO tool platform and describe how to use its API to build custom tools that utilize dynamic code manipulation for instrumentation, profiling, analysis, optimization, introspection, security, and more. The DynamoRIO tool platform has been used by many researchers to develop systems ranging from taint tracking to prefetch optimization. DynamoRIO is publicly available in open source form and targets Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android on IA-32, AMD64, ARM, and AArch64 platforms.

Topics

The tutorial will cover the following topics:

  • DynamoRIO API: an overview of the full range of DynamoRIO's powerful API, which 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. It includes both high-level features for quick prototyping and low-level features for full control over instrumentation performance.
  • DynamoRIO system overview: a brief description of how DynamoRIO works under the covers.
  • Description of tools provided with the DynamoRIO package, including the Dr. Memory memory debugging tool, the Dr. CacheSim memory tracing and cache simulation tool, the DrCov code coverage tool, the Dr. CPUSim legacy CPU tool, and the DrStrace Windows system call tracing tool.
  • Sample tool starting points for building new tools.
  • Advanced topics when building sophisticated tools.

Slides

The slides are now available in PDF, PPSX, and PDF with embedded fonts formats (the embedded font version contains some artifacts from conversion from Powerpoint that are not present in the non-embedded file).

Organizers

  • Derek Bruening (Google)
  • Chris Adeniyi-Jones (ARM)
  • Edmund Grimley-Evans (ARM)
  • Kevin Zhou (U. of Cambridge)

Questions

Questions about the tutorial can be sent to the DynamoRIO-Users mailing list.

References