Combining compile-time and run-time instrumentation for testing tools

Dynamic program analysis and testing tools typically require inserting extra instrumentation code into the program to test. The inserted instrumentation then gathers data about the program execution and hands it off to the analysis algorithm. Various analysis algorithms can be used to perform CPU profiling, processor cache simulation, memory error detection, data race detection, etc. Usually the instrumentation is done either at run time or atcompile time – called dynamic instrumentation and compiler instrumentation, respectively. However, each of these methods has to make a compromise between performance and versatil-ity when used in industry software development. This paper presents a combined approach to instrumentationwhich takes the best of the two worlds – the low run-time overhead and unique features of compile-time instrumentation and the flexibility of dynamic instrumentation. Wepresent modifications of two testing tools that benefit from thisapproach: AddressSanitizer and MemorySanitizer. We propose benchmarks to compare different instrumentation frameworks in conditions specific to hybrid instrumenta-tion. We discuss the changes we made to one of the state-of-the-art instrumentation frameworks to significantly improve the performance of hybrid tools.

• Software Engineering