How much code are you testing ? (4)

🧭 Where we left off Welcome back to our ongoing series on measuring test coverage for binary programs! In part 1 we used Go’s built-in -cover flag — clean and accurate, but only works if you own the source and can recompile. In part 2 we used valgrind and gdb to trace gzip without touching its source. In part 3 we explored Intel PIN, a proper dynamic binary instrumentation framework — powerful, but it came with a ~100MB proprietary C++ SDK and was limited to x86_64. ...

May 13, 2026 · Andrea Manzini

From QEMU Headache to Headless

😸 TL;DR Being lazy, I made a tool to run qcow2 images for my convenience. It now supports x86_64, aarch64, s390x, and ppc64le. Feel free to use it if you find it useful! 📖 The back story If you’ve ever typed qemu-system-x86_64 into your terminal, you know the feeling. A creeping dread. A cold sweat. The QEMU headache. It’s that special migraine reserved for developers who know they’re about to spend the next ten minutes deciphering their own shell history to remember that one magic flag for networking. ...

September 28, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

How much code are you testing ? (3)

▶️ Intro : Let Me Be On the previous post we continued our journey with a more complex scenario, using a mix of gdb and valgrind to trace all the function execution inside a given binary. This time, hold on because we’re cranking up the complexity. We’ll dive deeper into low-level analysis and explore how to use Intel PIN, a powerful dynamic instrumentation framework for manipulating and inspecting executable code at runtime. (Photo by FURQAN KHURSHID) ...

June 17, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

How much code are you testing ? (2)

▶️ Intro On the previous post we started our journey with a very simple scenario, and we used a nice feature of the Go programming language to get a measure of how much % of the target program our test is exercising. This time I am going to experiment a Proof of Concept about how we can obtain a test code coverage metric estimation for a normal binary program, without any recompilation. ...

March 30, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

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