Static Binary Instrumentation

From TracingWiki

Several tools were developed over the years to read executable binary programs and rewrite equivalent programs with some instrumentation added, and the references to relocated instructions updated. Examples include Pixie, QPT, EEL and ATOM. They were mostly developed for architectures with fixed length instructions (MIPS, Alpha, SPARC) and some were available at no cost for research purposes.

On the popular I386 Intel architecture, the complexity of the variable length instruction set makes program rewriting more difficult and favors other simpler but less efficient techniques typically used for dynamic binary instrumentation.