DynamoRIO

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About DynamoRIO

DynamoRIO is a runtime code manipulation system that supports code transformations on any part of a program, while it executes. DynamoRIO exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc. Unlike many dynamic tool systems, DynamoRIO is not limited to insertion of callouts/trampolines and allows arbitrary modifications to application instructions via a powerful IA-32/AMD64/ARM/AArch64 instruction manipulation library. DynamoRIO provides efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of unmodified applications running on stock operating systems (Windows, Linux, or Android) and commodity IA-32, AMD64, ARM, and AArch64 hardware. Mac OSX support is in progress.

Existing DynamoRIO-based tools

DynamoRIO is the basis for some well-known external tools:

Tools built on DynamoRIO and available in the release package include:

  • The memory debugging tool Dr. Memory
  • The tracing and analysis framework drmemtrace with multiple tools that operate on both online (with multi-process support) and offline instruction and memory address traces:
  • The legacy processor emulator drcpusim
  • The “strace for Windows” tool drstrace
  • The code coverage tool drcov
  • The library tracing tool drltrace
  • The memory address tracing tool memtrace (drmemtrace's offline traces are faster with more surrounding infrastructure, but this is a simpler starting point for customized memory address tracing)
  • The memory value tracing tool memval
  • The instruction tracing tool instrace (drmemtrace's offline traces are faster with more surrounding infrastructure, but this is a simpler starting point for customized instruction tracing)
  • The basic block tracing tool bbbuf
  • The instruction counting tool inscount
  • The dynamic fuzz testing tool Dr. Fuzz
  • The disassembly tool drdisas
  • And more, including opcode counts, branch instrumentation, etc.: see API samples

Building your own custom tools

DynamoRIO‘s powerful API abstracts away the details of the underlying infrastructure and allows the tool builder to concentrate on analyzing or modifying the application’s runtime code stream. API documentation is included in the release package and can also be browsed online. Slides from our past tutorials are also available.

Downloading DynamoRIO

DynamoRIO is available free of charge as a binary package for both Windows and Linux. DynamoRIO's source code is available primarily under a BSD license.

Obtaining Help

Use the discussion list to ask questions.

To report a bug, use the issue tracker.

See also the DynamoRIO home page: http://dynamorio.org/