aproftracer - Android Profile Tracing Using Linux Uprobes

This is the repository for the ASE paper Profile Coverage: Using Android Compilation Profiles to Evaluate Dynamic Testing. You can find the originally submitted artifact under the submitted-version tag.

We are preparing to upstream our patches to apkeep to download cloud profiles easily. If you can't wait for it to be available, you can check out our fork of apkeep and its dependency rs-google-play.

Overview

This repository contains two python projects in src/:

1. adbdevice

   • python bindings for adb (hw and emulator devices supported)
   • emulator control for automated creation/start/stop of emulators

2. aproftracer

   • depends on adbdevice
   • runs profile coverage experiments
     • starts emulator if asked to
     • installs apps from .apk + .dm if asked to
     • calculates offsets in .oat files
     • prepares and starts tracing using uprobe events for a given list of offsets
     • runs baseline/monkey/droidbot experiment
     • collects results
     • cleans up if asked to

The experiments folder contains Makefiles to run experiments, including downloading apps and cloud profiles. We use a patched version of apkeep and rs-google-play, and are in the process of upstreaming our patches.

The dependencies folder contains external dependencies that are not automatically installed. Install with git submodule update --init. Because the tools need patches, see the [dependencies/README.md] for more info.

Setup

1. create a pyenv for python 3.11.5
2. run pip instell -e . in both projects in src/
3. run aproftracer --help to get an overview of functionality
4. install dependencies: a. run git submodule update --init to fetch the dependencies droidbot, acvtool, and fastbot. b. see the [dependencies/Readme.md] for further instructions to apply necessary patches

Updates

Installing an app that requires split-APKs can fail when instrumented with ACVTool because the resulting base.apk will have a different signature from the split-APKs. Thanks to Aleksandr Pilgun, who pointed this out and provided the following recommendation:

acv instrument base.apk
acvpatcher -a split_config.arm64_v8a.apk
acvpatcher -a split_config.xhdpi.apk
adb uninstall <package>
adb install-multiple *.apk