Software instrumentation using dynamic techniques

Abstract — In this paper, we describe DIOTA, a dynamic instrumentation technique. The technique correctly deals with programs that contain traditionally hard to instrument features such as data in code and code in data. The technique does not require reverse engineering, program understanding tools or heuristics about the compiler or linker used. The basic idea is that instrumented code is generated on the fly, while the original process is used for data accesses. DIOTA comes with a number of useful backends to check programs for faulty memory accesses, data races, deadlocks,... and perform basic tracing operations, e.g. tracing all memory accesses, all code being executed, to perform coverage analysis,... DIOTA has been completely implemented for the IA32 architecture. I