Pin: building customized program analysis tools with dynamic instrumentation

ABSTRACT

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 executables while they are running. For efficiency, Pin uses several techniques, including inlining, register re-allocation, liveness analysis, and instruction scheduling to optimize instrumentation. This fully automated approach delivers significantly better instrumentation performance than similar tools. For example, Pin is 3.3x faster than Valgrind and 2x faster than DynamoRIO for basic-block counting. To illustrate Pin's versatility, we describe two Pintools in daily use to analyze production software. Pin is publicly available for Linux platforms on four architectures: IA32 (32-bit x86), EM64T (64-bit x86), Itanium®, and ARM. In the ten months since Pin 2 was released in July 2004, there have been over 3000 downloads from its website.

References

1. AMBER home page. http://amber.scripps.edu/.]]
2. Fluent home page. http://www.fluent.com/.]]
3. LS-DYNA home page. http://www.lstc.com/.]]
4. RenderMan home page. http://RenderMan.pixar.com/.]]
5. A.-R. Adl-Tabatabai, J. Bharadwaj, D.-Y. Chen, A. Ghuloum, V. Menon, B. Murphy, M. Serrano, and T. Shpeisman. The StarJIT compiler: A dynamic compiler for managed runtime environments. Intel Technology Journal, 7(1):19--31, Feb 2003.]]
6. D. L. Bruening. Efficient, Transparent, and Comprehensive Runtime Code Manipulation. PhD thesis, M.I.T. (http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/dynamorio/), September 2004.]]
7. B. R. Buck and J. Hollingsworth. An api for runtime code patching. Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 14(4):317--329, 2000.]]
8. M. G. Burke, J.-D. Choi, S. Fink, D. Grove, M. Hind, V. Sarkar, M. J. Serrano, V. C. Sreedhar, H. Srinivasan, and J. Whaley. The Jalapeno dynamic optimizing compiler for java. In ACM Java Grande Conference, pages 129--141, June 1999.]]
9. B. M. Cantrill, M. W. Shapiro, and A. H. Leventhal. Dynamic instrumentation of production systems. In Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2004.]]
10. K.D. Cooper, M.W. Hall, and K. Kennedy. A methodology for procedure cloning. Computer Languages, 19(2), April 1993.]]
11. J. L. Henning. SPEC CPU2000: measuring cpu performance in the new millennium. IEEE Computer, 33(7):28--35, July 2000.]]
12. Intel. Pin User Manual. http://rogue.colorado.edu/Pin.]]
13. Intel. Intel Itanium Architecture Software Developer's Manual Vols 1-4, Oct. 2002.]]
14. Intel. IA-32 Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual Vols 1-3, 2003.]]
15. Intel. Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology Software Developer's Guide Vols 1-2, 2004.]]
16. Intel. Intel PXA27x Processor Family Developer's Manual, April 2004.]]
17. H.-S. Kim and J. Smith. Hardware support for control transfers in code caches. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Dec 2003.]]
18. J. Larus and E. Schnarr. EEL: Machine-independent executable editing. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 95 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 291--300, June 1995.]]
19. P. Geoffrey Lowney, Stefan M. Freudenberger, Thomas J. Karzes, W. D. Lichtenstein, Robert P. Nix, John S. O'Donnell, and John C. Ruttenberg. The Multiflow Trace Scheduling compiler. The Journal of Supercomputing, 7(1-2):51--142, 1993.]]
20. Chi-Keung Luk, Robert Muth, Harish Patil, Robert Cohn, and Geoff Lowney. Ispike: A Post-link Optimizer for the Intel Itanium Architecture. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Code Generation and Optimization, pages 15--26, 2004.]]
21. J. Maebe, M. Ronsse, and K. De Bosschere. Diota: Dynamic instrumentation, optimization and transformation of applications. In Compendium of Workshops and Tutorials held in conjunction with PACT'02, 2002.]]
22. N. Nethercote and J. Seward. Valgrind: A program supervision framework. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Runtime Verification. http://valgrind.kde.org/, 2003.]]
23. H. Patil, R. Cohn, M. Charney, R. Kapoor, A. Sun, and A. Karunanidhi. Pinpointing representative portions of large intel itanium progams with dynamic instrumentation. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Dec 2004.]]
24. M. Poletto and V. Sarkar. Linear scan register allocation. ACM Transactions. on Programming Languages and Systems, 21(5):895--913, Sept 1999.]]
25. T. Romer, G. Voelker, D. Lee, A. Wolman, W. Wong, H. Levy, B. Bershad, and B. Chen. Instrumentation and optimization of win32/intel executables using Etch. In Proceedings of the USENIX Windows NT Workshop, pages 1--7, August 1997.]]
26. H. Saito, G. Gaertner, W. Jones, R. Eigenmann, H. Iwashita, R. Liberman, M. van Waveren, and B. Whitney. Large system performance of spec omp2001 benchmarks. In Proceedings of the 2002 Workship on OpenMP: Experiences and Implementation, 2002.]]
27. K. Scott, N. Kumar, S. Velusamy, B. Childers, J. Davidson, and M. L. Soffa. Reconfigurable and retargetable software dynamic translation. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Code Generation and Optimization, pages 36--47, 2003.]]
28. T. Sherwood, E. Perelman, G. Hamerly, and B. Calder. Automatically characterizing large scale program behavior. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Oct 2002.]]
29. A. Srivastava, A. Edwards, and H. Vo. Vulcan: Binary transformation in a distributed environment. Technical Report MSR-TR-2001-50, Microsoft Research, April 2001.]]
30. A. Srivastava and A. Eustace. Atom: A system for building customized program analysis tools. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 94 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 196--205, 1994.]]
31. X. Zhang, Z. Wang, N. Gloy, J. B. Chen, and M. D. Smith. System support for automatic profiling and optimization. In Proceedings of the 16th Symposium on Operating System Principles, October 1997.]]

Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software verification and validation

      • Process validation

        • Traceability

      • Software defect analysis

        • Software testing and debugging

  • Software notations and tools

    • Compilers

      • Incremental compilers