iProbe: A lightweight user-level dynamic instrumentation tool

We introduce a new hybrid instrumentation tool for dynamic application instrumentation called iProbe, which is flexible and has low overhead. iProbe takes a novel 2-stage design, and offloads much of the dynamic instrumentation complexity to an offline compilation stage. It leverages standard compiler flags to introduce “place-holders” for hooks in the program executable. Then it utilizes an efficient user-space “HotPatching” mechanism which modifies the functions to be traced and enables execution of instrumented code in a safe and secure manner. In its evaluation on a micro-benchmark and SPEC CPU2006 benchmark applications, the iProbe prototype achieved the instrumentation overhead an order of magnitude lower than existing state-of-the-art dynamic instrumentation tools like SystemTap and DynInst.