Re: [Qemu-devel] GSoC 2017 Proposal: TCG performance enhancements

[Lluís Vilanova]

Emilio G Cota writes:

> - Instrumentation. I think QEMU should have a good interface to enable
>   dynamic binary instrumentation. This has many uses and in fact there
>   are quite a few forks of QEMU doing this.
>   I think Lluís Vilanova's work [1] is a good start to eventually get
>   something upstream.

> [1] https://projects.gso.ac.upc.edu/projects/qemu-dbi

Hey, I'm really happy you think that's worth pursuing. Even if it doesn't look
like it, I keep working on this on small bits of free time. I have a few patch
series that were ready to send, but should now be rebased to upstream before
that. In fact, I have an academic paper on the back-burner describing the work I
did (there's some cool tricks), but was waiting to get the core
intrumentation-agnostic infrastructure upstreamed first.

My understanding was that adding a public instrumentation interface would add
too much code maintenance overhead for a feature that is not in QEMU's core
target.

During time, I've kept simplifying large parts of the intrumentation code base,
and maybe things have changed in QEMU enough to rethink if that's worth
integrating. Of course, I'm completely open to discuss it.


Cheers,
  Lluis