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 evaluation, and bug detection. To meet this need, we have developed a new instrumentation system called Pin. Our goals are to provide easy-to-use, portable, transparent, and efficient instrumentation. 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 without 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 architectures. 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, uninstrumented behavior. Pin uses dynamic compilation to instrument executabl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Chi-Keung Luk, Robert S. Cohn, Robert Muth, Harish Patil, Artur Klauser, P. Geoffrey Lowney, Steven Wallace, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Kim M. Hazelwood
• Keywords: Instrumentation, Instrumentation Tools, Pin’s Rich Api, PLDI 2005, Programming Languages