USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - USENIX Annual
Conference, General Session - June 2000
DITools: Application-level Support for Dynamic Extension and
Flexible Composition
Albert Serra, Nacho Navarro, and Toni Cortes, Universitat Politecnica
de Catalunya
Abstract
Today, operating systems set-up process images from executable files
using fixed rules. Programs are restricted to run in essentially the
same environment at every execution. However, we believe that this
behavior is not always convenient, and that many times it is interesting
to make variations to the execution environment, either to introduce new
functionality or to specialize critical services, even when their source
code is not available. This problem can be mitigated through
application-level extensibility and flexible composition of binary
modules.
In this paper, we describe DITOOLS an application-level tool that
supports dynamic interposition on dynamically-linked procedure-call
boundaries. This tool enables both global and per-module dynamic
interposition. We also present a detailed use of DITOOLS and various
short examples of extensions.
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