Scalable Support for Multithreaded Applications on Dynamic Binary Instrumentation Systems

Dynamic binary instrumentation systems are used to inject or modify arbitrary instructions in existing binary applications; several such systems have been developed over the past decade. Much of the literature describing the internal architecture and performance of these systems has focused on executing single-threaded guest applications. In this paper, the authors discuss the specific design decisions necessary for supporting large, multi-threaded applications on JIT-based dynamic instrumentation systems. While implementing a working solution for multi-threading is straightforward, providing a system that scales in terms of memory and performance is much more intricate.