Implementation of Plugins for Runtime and Memory Access Profile Collection, Using the QEMU Emulator as a Tool for Dynamic Instrumentation

Student: Evzman Yan

Educational Programme: Applied Mathematics and Information Science (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2024

This paper examines the use of QEMU as a dynamic tool to collect execution and memory consumption profiles without being architecture-specific and without the need to modify binary files. The study in detail considers TCG (Tiny Code Generator), QEMU IR (Intermediate Representation) and the QEMU plugin API, and analyses the problems and solutions encountered in plugin development. A comparison is made with existing tooling tools such as perf, DynamoRIO, Intel PIN and BOLT to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach. The effectiveness of low-level profile-generated optimisations (PGO) to improve software performance is also highlighted. The application of the optimisations allowed for an increase in performance of different types of software from 5 Keywords: instrumentation; profile; PGO; QEMU emulator; Tiny Code Generator; Intermediate Representation; API.

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