From: Eric Roman (eroman_at_lbl.gov)
Date: Mon Jun 10 2002 - 16:30:31 PDT
So anyway, it occurred to me earlier today that we might be able to use dynInst as a cheap runtime mechanism to redirect system calls from applications at run time without the use of an LD_PRELOAD. We may be able to use this thing as a cheap way to bounce non-checkpoint safe library calls through a runtime wrapper. I haven't thought too much about the pros and cons, but it may be an option for some time next year. Here are some goodies: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/papers/hijack.pdf The Condor folks explaining their latest tricks. http://www.dyninst.org/papers/apiPreprint.pdf Basics of the dynInst API http://www.cs.utk.edu/~dongarra/lyon2000/Talk22-Bart-Miller.ppt How to bypass the FrameMaker license manager... (!) http://www.paradyn.org/ ParaDyn. It's sort of a parallel version w/ a cutesy Tcl interface built on top of this. Turns out that this thing is actually installed on our cluster. Small world. More interesting is DPCL. Dynamic Probes Class Library. IBMs commercialized version of the idea. (Link?) Might work on the SP? http://oss.software.ibm.com/developer/opensource/linux/projects/dprobes/ Dprobes for Linux. The same idea, but you can now inject kernel code. I heard a talk on this about a year ago at USENIX. The guy who developed it said they used to use it to debug problems with the OS/2 filesystem... on running systems... at banks! Scary stuff. - E -- Eric Roman <eroman_at_lbl_dot_gov> Future Technologies Group 510-486-6420 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory