Dyninst 9.x

Version 9.3.2

^{Released on April 5, 2017}

Improvements from 9.3.1

• i386 build fixes
• Fixes for binary rewriter tests
• Many ARMv8 decoding fixes verified
• Bug fixes for relocating functions with exception handling
• Bug fixes for reference counting of type objects
• Documentation updates

Version 9.3.1

^{Released on March 2, 2017}

Includes minor bugfixes from 9.3.0

Version 9.3.0

^{Released on December 22, 2016}

New features

• Full support for Knight's Landing processors
• First official release of ParseAPI for ARMv8
• First release of cross-architecture binary analysis capabilities (parsing of ARM binaries on x86 and vice versa, for example). PowerPC parsing still requires compile-time selection of endianness; a fix for this is coming in 9.3.1. This is a significant step in our long road to making Dyninst's host and target platforms fully independent from each other.
• Dyninst can now safely relocate and instrument code containing C++ exceptions.
• Documented various ProcControl and Stackwalker tracking/tracking control interfaces.
• Read access to Symtab and ParseAPI data structures should now be thread-safe, provided that you force eager creation of those data structures. If there exist data structures that cannot be eagerly created and are thus thread-unsafe for your use case, please let us know.
• Automatic detection of Dyninst runtime library location (currently Unix-ish only, Windows support to follow in 9.3.1).
• Cotire added to speed up build. If building with GCC, this requires version >= 4.5.0; for all compilers, this requires CMake >= 2.8.12.
• Improvements to stack analysis on x86

Improvements from 9.2.0

• Fixed segfault when a process is attached without specifying executable name
• Fixed crash in liveness
• Fixed assert when running stack modifications on SPEC
• Fixed multiple jump table parsing issues
• Fixed findMain analysis for stripped binaries
• Assorted fixes in line information handling
• Assorted fixes for race conditions in ProcControl
• Fixed cases where Dyninst heaps were not allocated sufficiently close to the code being relocated into them
• Ensured stack modification code is only built on supported platforms (x86/Linux for now)

Version 9.2.0

^{Released on June 29, 2016}

New features

• ARM64 SIMD support in InstructionAPI
• Support for all x86 instruction sets up to Knight's Landing (AVX, AVX2, AVX512)
• DataflowAPI now has an official manual
• Initial ppc64/little endian support in Symtab, InstructionAPI, ProcControl, and Stackwalker. Add -Darch_ppc64_little_endian to your CMake command line when building on little-endian ppc64 systems
• New InstructionAPI test framework based on structured fuzzing. This resulted in finding (and fixing) lots of corner-case instruction parsing errors. The fuzzer framework, called Peach, will be released later this year.
• Main source code repository has moved to GitHub. Older Dyninst releases may be found at https://github.com/dyninst/dyninst/releases

Improvements from 9.1.0

• PIE binaries should now be rewritten correctly, even if they have a zero base address
• Symtab should now correctly file symbols into their associated modules based on the best available DWARF information
• Many more fixes in x86 instruction decoding
• Enhancements to jump table analysis
• PC-relative memory accesses in VEX instructions can now be relocated correctly
• Various proccontrol bug fixes
• RTlib's DYNINSTos_malloc and DYNINSTos_free should now be signal-safe
• RTlib's tramp guard lock/unlock functions should now avoid making implicit function calls (which are unsafe from tramp guard code)
• ppc64 bit rot for create/attach modes is fixed

Known Issues

• ppc64 rewriter mode does not yet handle code that does not conform to the "caller sets up TOC" model for intermodule calls
• Windows 64-bit mode is not yet supported
• Windows rewriter mode is not yet supported
• Exceptions in relocated code will not be caught
• Linux rewriter mode for 32-bit, statically linked binaries does not support binaries with .plt, .rel, or .rela sections.
• Callbacks at thread or process exit that stop the process will deadlock when a SIGSEGV occurs on a thread other than the main thread of a process
• InstructionAPI's format() method does not produce AT&T syntax output
• Stackwalker is fragile on Windows
• Parsing a binary with no functions (typically a single object file) will crash at CodeObject destruction time.

Version 9.1.0

^{Released on December 15, 2015}

Interface changes

• Shared objects and executables now both correspond to BPatch_objects, and their constituent .o files correspond to BPatch_modules

New features

• Initial ARM64 implementation of InstructionAPI (SIMD instructions are currently not supported)
• New code example: disassembler
• Boost should now auto-detect up to version 1.59

Improvements from 9.0.3

• Fixed LD_PRELOAD support
• Relocation and instrumentation no longer trigger unnecessary parsing on Windows
• Windows no longer misidentifies calling conventions due to use-after-free string corruption
• Slicing no longer attempts to follow edges to or from catch blocks

Known Bugs

• See 9.0.3 Known Bugs.

Version 9.0.3

^{Released on August 28, 2015}
Improvements from 9.0.2

• Minor bugfixes.

Known Bugs

• See 9.0.2 Known Bugs.

Version 9.0.2

^{Released on August 24, 2015}
Improvements from 9.0.1

• Minor bugfixes.

Known Bugs

• See 9.0.1 Known Bugs.

Version 9.0.1

^{Released on August 21, 2015}
Improvements from 9.0.0

• Minor bugfixes.

Known Bugs

• See 9.0.0 Known Bugs.

Version 9.0.0

^{Released on August 20, 2015}
Improvements from 8.2.1

• Dyninst now allows modification of the stack frames of functions. See the manual for details.
• SD-Dyninst is now integrated into the Dyninst main line. See the manual for details.
• Machine learning based gap parsing rules are now integrated into Dyninst, and no longer need to be compiler-specific. Gap parsing should find significantly more function entry points, particularly when run on code generated by non-GNU compilers.
• SymtabAPI now provides information about inlined functions. See the manual for details.
• SymtabAPI (in read-only mode), ProcControl, and Stackwalker (in 3rd-party mode) now work on ARM64 Linux.
• Loops are now represented in ParseAPI and PatchAPI, as well as at the BPatch level. The loop interface has been extended to represent irreducible loops correctly; see the manual for details.
• Indirect control flow is now analyzed by a principled, slicing-based approach and its accuracy is substantially improved.
• SymtabAPI and ParseAPI should consume much less memory for representing symbols, symbol indexes, line information, block extents, and function extents. There will be a small CPU penalty when opening files under SymtabAPI in exchange for this.
• ProcControl, in conjunction with Symtab, now supports accessing variables located in thread-local storage on Linux. See the manual for details.
• TrampGuards have been optimized.
• Compile-time thread limit on mutatees has been removed.
• Fixes in ProcControl's exit handling code.

Known Bugs

• Windows: inserting call snippets to call __thiscall or __fastcall functions is unsafe. __cdecl and __stdcall work.
• Windows: binary rewriting is still not supported, but is coming soon.