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

Abstract

As software complexity increases, the analysis of code behavior during its execution is becoming more important. Instrumentation techniques, through the insertion of code directly into binaries, are essential for program analyses used in debugging, runtime profiling, and performance evaluation. 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 both coarse-grain behavior, such as the execution time of different functions, as well as finer-grain actions, 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.