BiRFIA: Selective Binary Rewriting for Function Interception on ARM

Abstract

Function interception of fully-optimized binaries is widely used for optimization with its ability to accurately collect runtime information and detect inefficiencies at the function level. However, the implementation of function interception with existing binary rewriting techniques still suffers from limited reliability and performance on ARM platform. In this paper, we propose BiRFIA, an efficient selective binary rewriting framework for function interception targeting highly optimized binaries on ARM platforms. BiRFIA performs static binary rewriting of specific functions and intercepts them through well-formed trampoline sections and external instrumentation libraries. Besides, BiRFIA places complex instrumentation code in the trampoline section and jumps to the trampoline section via an adaptive instruction eviction strategy, which significantly reduces the probability of unexpected errors. For evaluation, we develop two function interception tools based on BiRFIA, including a function performance event counter collector and a function parameter tracer. Guided by these tools, we optimize several benchmarks and real-world programs, yielding up to 8% performance speedup. Our evaluation result demonstrates that BiRFIA incurs negligible runtime overhead of 1.006× on average.