I am working on a project where I need to track changes to particular set of variables in any given application code to model memory access patterns.
I can think of two approaches mainly, please give your thoughts on them.
- My initial thought is to do it like many profilers like gprof would do, where I add instrumentation code in the target application code before compilation and analyze the log generated by this instrumentation code to the get required information.
To accomplish, I can only think of some sort of source-to-source compiler where it parses given code and injects instrumentation code (Same language source-source compiler) into application which I can later compile and run to get the required logs.
Does this seem right or am I over-engineering? If not, are there tools that let me build a source-source compiler (relatively) easily?
- I read about GDB's support for python, so, I am thinking if I can write a python script to get set of variables as config file and set watchpoints and log everytime there is a write to variables being watched. I tried to use this GDB feature but on my Ubuntu machine it doesn't seem to be working for now. http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python.html#Python
And, the language of applications is going to be nesC (I guess nesC is converted to C in the process of compilation) (and applications are going to run on TOSSIM like native apps on my computer).
See my paper on instrumenting codes using a program transformation systems (PTS) (PTS is a very general kind of "source-to-source compiler).
It shows how to install probes in code in a pretty straightforward way, once you have a grammar for the language of interest. The underlying tool, DMS, makes it fairly easy to define the grammar too.