PinADX: an interface for customizable debugging with dynamic instrumentation

Abstract

Dynamic binary instrumentation systems have become popular frameworks for building custom program analysis tools. For example, Pin [8], Valgrind [9], and DynamoRIO [5] have been used to build a variety of memory checking, thread checking, cache simulation, and profiling tools. However, there has been little emphasis on building custom debugging tools with these frameworks. We introduce PinADX, a set of debugging extensions to the Pin instrumentation framework that allow easy development of custom debugger features on both Linux and Windows. This paper presents the PinADX API, demonstrates its use in a simple debugger extension, discusses the implementation details in the Pin instrumentation system, and shows that the performance is better than a native debugger for some typical debugging tasks. We believe that dynamic instrumentation technology is a powerful tool for building advanced debugging features and that an easy to use API will greatly facilitate the development of such features.