Reengineering Standard Java Runtime Systems through Dynamic Bytecode Instrumentation

Java bytecode instrumentation is a widely used technique, especially for profiling purposes. In order to ensure the instrumentation of all classes in the system, including dynamically generated or downloaded code, instrumentation has to be performed at runtime. The standard JDK offers some mechanisms for dynamic instrumentation, which however either require the use of native code or impose severe restrictions on the instrumentation of certain core classes of the JDK. These limitations prevent several instrumentation techniques that are important for efficient, calling context-sensitive profiling. In this paper we present a generic bytecode instrumentation framework that goes beyond these restrictions and enables the customized, dynamic instrumentation of all classes in pure Java. Our framework addresses important issues, such as bootstrapping an instrumented JDK, as well as avoiding measurement perturbations due to dynamic instrumentation or execution of instrumentation code. We validated and evaluated our framework using an instrumentation for exact profiling which generates complete calling context trees of various platform-independent dynamic metrics.