article

Pin: building customized program analysis tools with dynamic instrumentation

Authors:

Steven Wallace,

Vijay Janapa Reddi,

Kim HazelwoodAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 40, Issue 6

Pages 190 - 200

https://doi.org/10.1145/1064978.1065034

Published: 12 June 2005 Publication History

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.

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Index Terms

Pin: building customized program analysis tools with dynamic instrumentation
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Process validation
        Traceability
      2. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Incremental compilers

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 40, Issue 6

Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation

June 2005

325 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1064978

Issue’s Table of Contents

PLDI '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
June 2005
338 pages
ISBN:1595930566
DOI:10.1145/1065010
General Chair:
Vivek Sarkar
IBM Research
,
Program Chair:
Mary Hall
USC/ISI

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 12 June 2005

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 40, Issue 6

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.simpat.2024.103032
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Niu WZhang KYan RLi JZhang YZhang X(2025)ROPGMN: Effective ROP and variants discovery using dynamic feature and graph matching networkFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2024.107567164(107567)Online publication date: Mar-2025
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