Redundancy Suppression In Time-Aware Dynamic Binary Instrumentation
This addresses the issue of unacceptable perturbation for time-sensitive applications like VLC and PostgreSQL, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing tools like Pin.
The paper tackled the problem of instrumentation overhead in time-sensitive applications by developing DIME*, a dynamic binary instrumentation tool that reduces overhead by one to three orders of magnitude compared to native Pin while extracting up to 99% of the information.
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*.