Metaman

Abstract

Understanding how programs are created and how they behave at run time is vital to building secure and efficient programs. Typically program information generated when building and linking a program is not available to run-time instrumentation tools that are used to better understand and improve program behavior. This paper presents the structure of Metaman, the metadata manager, a tool for building instrumented systems that spans the entire build and run-time system. Metaman collects available metadata about the program from build tools as well as run-time tools as XML, and then makes the metadata available to the rest of the tools in the toolchain. In order for Metaman to be practical, it must be easy for each tool to send and receive metadata from Metaman. This paper discusses: (1) the process of adapting of build-time tools such as compilers, assemblers and static analyzers for use with Metaman, (2) the process of adapting the build system to assist in correctly coordinating novel metadata, and finally (3) the process of integrating run-time development tools such as debuggers, instrumentation tools, and software dynamic translators (SDT) for use with Metaman. Category. D.2.6 [Programming Environments]