cid 009788772af1a8fa0753133a20499e0516dbc085fd526309ed026242ebc11242 · original · via openalex
Title: Valgrind Authors: Nicholas Nethercote; Julian Seward Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices Year: 2007 Canonical: doi:10.1145/1273442.1250746 URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/1273442.1250746 Collector: openalex OA: false ABSTRACT Dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) frameworks make it easy to build dynamic binary analysis (DBA) tools such as checkers and profilers. Much of the focus on DBI frameworks has been on performance; little attention has been paid to their capabilities. As a result, we believe the potential of DBI has not been fully exploited. In this paper we describe Valgrind, a DBI framework designed for building heavyweight DBA tools. We focus on its unique support for shadow values -a powerful but previously little-studied and difficult-to-implement DBA technique, which requires a tool to shadow every register and memory value with another value that describes it. This support accounts for several crucial design features that distinguish Valgrind from other DBI frameworks. Because of these features, lightweight tools built with Valgrind run comparatively slowly, but Valgrind can be used to build more interesting, heavyweight tools that are difficult or impossible to build with other DBI frameworks such as Pin and DynamoRIO.