MIL : A language to build program analysis tools through static binary instrumentation

International audienceAs software complexity increases, the analysis of code behavior during its execution is becoming more important. Instru- mentation techniques, through the insertion of code directly into binaries, are essential to program analyses such as performance evaluation and profiling. In the context of high-performance parallel applications, building an instrumentation framework is quite challenging. One of the difficulties is due to the necessity to capture coarse grain behavior, such as the execution time of different functions, as well as finer-grain behavior in order to pinpoint performance issues. In this paper, we propose a language, MIL, for the development of program analysis tools based on static binary instrumentation. The key feature of MIL is to ease the integration of static, global program analysis with instrumentation. We will show how this enables both a precise targeting of the code regions to analyze, and a better understanding of the optimized program behavior