Tracing V8 using Intel PIN

[jesseb...@cs.arizona.edu]

Hello everyone,

My colleagues and I are working on a dynamic analysis project and we were hoping to be able to instrument V8. I was wondering if anyone has had experience in trying to obtain execution traces from V8 using Pin. Currently we have been unable to actually record any traces (even with the -execv flag, which allows Pin to follow forks/clone). I've been trying to trace both the V8 shell and d8 with external javascript files, but the resulting traces from Pin are empty (even though the javascript files are executed and I get the output I am expecting). If anyone has any suggestions or previous experiences for why V8 doesn't get traced by Pin, I'd love to hear them!

Thank you for your time and patience!

[Ben Noordhuis]

I expect it's because V8 is a just-in-time compiler, it generates
machine code on the fly. Intel VTune is another instrumenting tool
that doesn't work without custom hooks, see src/third_party/vtune.