Redundancy Suppression In Time-Aware Dynamic Binary Instrumentation

TL;DR

DIME* is a time-aware dynamic binary instrumentation tool that reduces overhead by suppressing redundant trace data, enabling efficient program analysis under timing constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a rate-based approach to suppress redundancies in dynamic binary instrumentation, maintaining timing constraints while significantly reducing overhead.

Findings

Reduces instrumentation overhead by up to 1000x.

Extracts up to 99% of trace information.

Demonstrated on VLC and PostgreSQL.

Abstract

Software tracing techniques are well-established and used by instrumentation tools to extract run-time information for program analysis and debugging. Dynamic binary instrumentation as one tool instruments program binaries to extract information. Unfortunately, instrumentation causes perturbation that is unacceptable for time-sensitive applications. Consequently we developed DIME*, a tool for dynamic binary instrumentation that considers timing constraints. DIME* uses Pin and a rate-based server approach to extract information only as long as user-specified constraints are maintained. Due to the large amount of redundancies in program traces, DIME* reduces the instrumentation overhead by one to three orders of magnitude compared to native Pin while extracting up to 99% of the information. We instrument VLC and PostgreSQL to demonstrate the usability of DIME*.