Formally efficient program instrumentation

Authors:
Boris Feigin;Alan Mycroft
Affiliations:
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge;Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Venue:
RV'10 Proceedings of the First international conference on Runtime verification
Year:
2010

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Abstract

The term "instrumentation" refers to modification of a program or its runtime environment to make hidden details of execution visible. Instrumentation can severely compromise program execution speed. Frameworks like DTrace (Sun Microsystems) and VProbes (VMware) offer practical ways of addressing performance concerns, but there has been no formal understanding of what it means for instrumentation to be efficient. To fill this gap, we propose a criterion based on that of Popek and Goldberg for virtual machines and on our previous work relating this to Jones optimality of program specializers. We further suggest linguistic constraints on instrumentation code to enable more aggressive static optimization of dynamically instrumented programs.