Pin: building customized program analysis tools with dynamic instrumentation

Robust and powerful software instrumentation tools are essential for program analysis tasks such as profiling, performance evalu-ation, and bug detection. To meet this need, we have developed a new instrumentation system called Pin. Our goals are to pro-vide easy-to-use, portable, transparent, and efficient instrumenta-tion. Instrumentation tools (called Pintools) are written in C/C++ using Pin’s rich API. Pin follows the model of ATOM, allowing the tool writer to analyze an application at the instruction level with-out the need for detailed knowledge of the underlying instruction set. The API is designed to be architecture independent whenever possible, making Pintools source compatible across different archi-tectures. However, a Pintool can access architecture-specific details when necessary. Instrumentation with Pin is mostly transparent as the application and Pintool observe the application’s original, unin-strumented behavior. Pin uses dynamic compilation to instrument executables while they are running. For efficiency, Pin uses sev-eral techniques, including inlining, register re-allocation, liveness analysis, and instruction scheduling to optimize instrumentation. This fully automated approach delivers significantly better instru-mentation performance than similar tools. For example, Pin is 3.3x faster than Valgrind and 2x faster than DynamoRIO for basic-block counting. To illustrate Pin’s versatility, we describe two Pintools in daily use to analyze production software. Pin is publicly avail-able for Linux platforms on four architectures: IA32 (32-bit x86), EM64T (64-bit x86), Itanium R8, and ARM. In the ten months since Pin 2 was released in July 2004, there have been over 3000 down-loads from its website