Programs

As well as the main executable, penguinTrace also provides some other helper programs for testing. Passing -h/--help to the programs will show usage and full options.

penguintrace

This is the main executable of penguinTrace. It starts the webserver and handles creating, running and controlling debugging sessions.

dwarf-info

This parses the debugging information in a binary and prints it to stdout.

compile

This compiles a binary in the same way as code in the web interface. This produces a binary that can be uploaded in the web interface by including source code information. The language to use is determined by the extension of the input file.

Extension	Language
.asm, .s	Assembly
.c	C
.cpp, .cxx	C++

step-elf

This runs a binary on the command line, stepping each instruction. By default it will continue stepping automatically until the end of the program. If the AUTO_STEP option is set to false, it will only advance after pressing Enter.

run-elf

This is similar to step-elf but continues until hitting a breakpoint. This can be useful to ‘skip’ to a particular point in a program. A breakpoint can be added with an int3 instruction in an assembly program, or using inline assembly in a C/C++ program:

   __asm("int3");

In AArch64, a breakpoint is provided by the bkpt instruction in place of int3.

Note: currently run-elf doesn’t have any functionality to convert the breakpoint into a nop and continue execution.

session-id-gen

This generates session IDs in the same way as the user interface. It is called with a single integer argument which is the number of IDs to generate.