Pin - A Binary Instrumentation Tool
Overview
Pin is a dynamic binary instrumentation framework for the IA-32 and x86-64 instruction-set architectures that enables the creation of dynamic program analysis tools. Some tools built with Pin are VTune Amplifier XE, Inspector XE, Advisor XE and SDE. The tools created using Pin, called Pintools, can be used to perform program analysis on user space applications in Linux and Windows. As a dynamic binary instrumentation tool, instrumentation is performed at run time on the compiled binary files. Thus, it requires no recompiling of source code and can support instrumenting programs that dynamically generate code.
Pin provides a rich API that abstracts away the underlying instruction-set idiosyncrasies and allows context information such as register contents to be passed to the injected code as parameters. Pin automatically saves and restores the registers that are overwritten by the injected code so the application continues to work. Limited access to symbol and debug information is available as well.
Pin was originally created as a tool for computer architecture analysis, but its flexible API and an active community (called "Pinheads") have created a diverse set of tools for security, emulation and parallel program analysis.
Distribution
Pin is proprietary software developed and supported by Intel and is supplied free of charge for non-commercial use. Pin includes the source code for a large number of example instrumentation tools like basic block profilers, cache simulators, instruction trace generators, etc. It is easy to derive new tools using the examples as a template.