Release Notes for Version 3.2.0

This section is divided into the following subsections:

Distribution Contents

The following are part of the DynamoRIO release distribution:

When unpacking the release package on Windows, be aware that the Cygwin unzip utility does not preserve executable permissions properly. After unzipping, add ugo+rx permissions to all of the .dll and .exe files in the resulting directory tree: 

find . -name \*.dll -exec chmod ugo+rx {} \; -o -name \*.exe -exec chmod ugo+rx {} \;

Changes Since Prior Releases

The current version is 3.2.0.

The changes between version 3.2.0 and 3.1.0 are:

Version 3.0.0 was a development version. 3.1.0 is the first official released version of the 3.x series.

The changes between version 3.0.0 and 2.2.0 include the following major features:

IMPORTANT: The 3.0.0 and onward client API is mostly backward compatible with releases from 1.0.0 (originally called 0.9.6: see below) onward with the exception of functions that involve dr_mcontext_t and several other source and binary compatibility changes since version 2.2.0 described below. The dr_mcontext_t struct and all structs that contain it have changed and are NOT backward compatible with releases prior to 3.0.0.

A sample script for updating client sources to the 3.0.0 API's version of dr_mcontext_t and related functions is as follows:

perl -pi -e '\
s|dr_mcontext_t (\w+);|dr_mcontext_t \1 = {sizeof(\1),DR_MC_ALL,};|;\
s|(dr_[gs]et_mcontext\(\S+,\s+\S+),\s+[^\s\)]+\)|\1)|;\
s|(dr_redirect_execution\(\S+),\s+\S+\)|\1)|;\
s|^\s+int app_errno;\s*\n||ms;\
s|raw_mcontext\.|raw_mcontext->|g;\
s|info->mcontext\.|info->mcontext->|g;\
s|excpt->mcontext\.|excpt->mcontext->|g;' *.c

The script makes 3 main changes. First, any dr_mcontext_t allocated by the client must have its size and flags fields set. Second, the app_errno parameter was removed from several functions; it required a local variable, so any local named app_errno is removed. Third, the dr_mcontext_t fields in the fault, signal, and exception structs all became pointers.

This script may not catch all cases. Use your version control system to look at the diff after applying it to ensure it did not change anything it shouldn't have. Run with debug build to catch other instances where dr_mcontext_t.size is not set. Also note that using the dr_mcontext_t initialization syntax in the script will end up calling memset; for performance-critical situations, instead initialize only the size and flags fields separately. Also note that if the xmm or ymm registers are not needed, asking for DR_MC_CONTROL and/or DR_MC_INTEGER is more performant than DR_MC_ALL.

IMPORTANT: Further changes between version 3.0.0 and 2.2.0 include the following that affect source and/or binary compatibilty:

Additional changes between version 3.0.0 and 2.2.0 include the following:

The changes between version 2.2.0 and 2.1.0 are:

The changes between version 2.1.0 and 2.0.0 are:

In version 2.0.0, the configuration and deployment API and tools changed and are not backward compatible with earlier versions: see below for details. The changes between version 2.0.0 and 1.5.0 are:

The changes between version 1.5.0 and 1.4.0 are:

The changes between version 1.4.0 and 1.3.2 are:

The changes between version 1.3.2 and 1.3.1 are:

Version 1.3.1 is identical to 1.3.0 but is under a BSD license (see License).

We re-numbered the previous DynamoRIO versions as follows:

The changes between version 1.3.0 and version 1.2.0 (0.9.6 9602) are:

The changes between the 0.9.6 release builds 9602 and 9601 are:

The changes between the 0.9.6 release builds 9601 and 9600 are:

Release 0.9.6 is not backward compatible with prior releases 0.9.1-0.9.5.

The major changes between the 0.9.6 and 0.9.5 releases include 64-bit support, multiple clients, state translation, trace contents, and Linux module events and fast system calls:

The major changes between the 0.9.5 and 0.9.4 releases are:

Limitations

Client Limitations

The most important limitation on a client is that it remain transparent. This is described fully in Client Transparency. Here we summarize the key points to remain transparent:

Platform Limitations

Performance Limitations

Deployment Limitations

Plans for Future Releases

We hope to include the following major features in future releases:

To discuss current and future features, join the DynamoRIO Users group.

  DynamoRIO API version 3.2.0 --- Wed Mar 28 12:55:33 2012