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Dyninst 10.0 Road Map

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Bill Williams edited this page Mar 15, 2017 · 6 revisions

For our next major release, Dyninst 10.0, we're planning on some more radical changes to our code base than usual; we're going to break backwards compatibility for a nontrivial number of interfaces, and we will be adding significant changes to our dependencies and to our libraries themselves. Below is a preliminary list of some of the Dyninst 10 features in development or discussion. Feedback is strongly encouraged.

PLATFORM UPDATES

  • Make Dyninst feature complete on ARMv8/64
  • Make progress on ARM/32 implementation
  • Add ppc64 instruction semantics and semantics-based jump table analysis
  • Windows binary rewriter?
  • Win64 support?
  • CUbin support (level and form TBD)
    • Symtab
      • understand appropriate sections as containing sub-Symtabs
      • associate debug info correctly
      • ensure that GPU architectures are handled appropriately
    • ParseAPI
      • build CFGs given either instructionAPI support or an appropriate block-level API for direct CFG construction
    • InstructionAPI
      • architectures TBD

API CHANGES

  • Liberal replacement of raw pointers with shared pointers
  • Replace asserts with exceptions or local error handling (everywhere)
  • Replace unlikely error return/outparam interfaces with return value/exception?
  • Deduplication of data using multi-index containers
  • API will use C++11 standard
  • Make each Dyninst library self-contained from a linking perspective
  • Replace BPatch-level classes that serve as pass-throughs to component classes with direct use of the component classes?

CROSS-PLATFORM SUPPORT

  • Allow Windows builds to analyze ELF files?
  • Cross-platform binary rewriting?
  • ProcControl over network as a first step to cross-platform dynamic instrumentation?

MULTITHREADING SUPPORT

  • Add option to parallelize various analyses in Dyninst
    • DWARF parsing
    • CFG parsing/construction
    • other?
  • Add option to use Cilk for multithreading
  • Continue increasing thread-safety of Dyninst components:
    • Fix any outstanding issues in read access to Symtab/ParseAPI data structures
    • Add thread safety to other components for read access?
    • Add thread safety to Symtab/ParseAPI for write access?

INFRASTRUCTURE

  • Migrate from libdwarf to libdw
  • Test suite improvements?
    • Integrate as submodule
    • Better use of prolog for efficient coverage
    • Meaningful names on tests
    • ParseAPI test cases
  • Logging improvements?
    • Use a standard logging library?
    • Start migrating from printf-style to stream-style?
  • Serialization of CFGs to/from graphviz format?
  • More rational structure of code generation?
    • Generate all instruction sequences through Emitters
    • Abstract away BaseTramp into allocate/spill/restore, recursion guard, call setup?
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