710 research outputs found
Instrumenting self-modifying code
Adding small code snippets at key points to existing code fragments is called
instrumentation. It is an established technique to debug certain otherwise hard
to solve faults, such as memory management issues and data races. Dynamic
instrumentation can already be used to analyse code which is loaded or even
generated at run time.With the advent of environments such as the Java Virtual
Machine with optimizing Just-In-Time compilers, a new obstacle arises:
self-modifying code. In order to instrument this kind of code correctly, one
must be able to detect modifications and adapt the instrumentation code
accordingly, preferably without incurring a high penalty speedwise. In this
paper we propose an innovative technique that uses the hardware page protection
mechanism of modern processors to detect such modifications. We also show how
an instrumentor can adapt the instrumented version depending on the kind of
modificiations as well as an experimental evaluation of said techniques.Comment: In M. Ronsse, K. De Bosschere (eds), proceedings of the Fifth
International Workshop on Automated Debugging (AADEBUG 2003), September 2003,
Ghent. cs.SE/030902
Non-intrusive on-the-fly data race detection using execution replay
This paper presents a practical solution for detecting data races in parallel
programs. The solution consists of a combination of execution replay (RecPlay)
with automatic on-the-fly data race detection. This combination enables us to
perform the data race detection on an unaltered execution (almost no probe
effect). Furthermore, the usage of multilevel bitmaps and snooped matrix clocks
limits the amount of memory used. As the record phase of RecPlay is highly
efficient, there is no need to switch it off, hereby eliminating the
possibility of Heisenbugs because tracing can be left on all the time.Comment: In M. Ducasse (ed), proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop
on Automated Debugging (AAdebug 2000), August 2000, Munich. cs.SE/001003
Can we apply accelerator-cores to control-intensive programs?
There is a trend towards using accelerators to increase performance and energy efficiency of general-purpose processors. So far, most accelerators have been build with HPC-applications in mind. A question that arises is how well can other applications benefit from these accelerators?
In this paper, we discuss the acceleration of three benchmarks
using the SPUs of a Cell-BE. We analyze the potential speedup given the inherent parallelism in the applications. While the potential speedup is significant in all benchmarks, the obtained speedup lags behind due to a mismatch between micro-architectural properties of the accelerators and the benchmark properties
Tail-tip chordoma in a ferret: cytology with histological and immunohistochemical confirmation
A 4.5-year-old, healthy female intact ferret (Mustela putorius furo) was presented with a mass on the tip of its tail. Cytological, histopathological and immunohistochemical features were compatible with those of a chordoma. The present case describes and illustrates cytology findings and diagnosis of chordoma, confirmed by histopathology and immunohistochemistry
Factoring out ordered sections to expose thread-level parallelism
With the rise of multi-core processors, researchers are taking a new look at extending the applicability auto-parallelization techniques. In this paper, we identify a dependence pattern on which autoparallelization currently fails. This dependence pattern occurs for ordered sections, i.e. code fragments in a loop that must be executed atomically and in original program order. We discuss why these ordered sections prohibit current auto-parallelizers from working and we present a technique to deal with them. We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy of the technique, yielding significant overall program speedups
Protecting your software updates
As described in many blog posts and the scientific literature, exploits for software vulnerabilities are often engineered on the basis of patches, which often involves the manual or automated identification of vulnerable code. The authors evaluate how this identification can be automated with the most frequently referenced diffing tools, demonstrating that for certain types of patches, these tools are indeed effective attacker tools. But they also demonstrate that by using binary code diversification, the effectiveness of the tools can be diminished severely, thus severely closing the attacker's window of opportunity
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