The History of DynamoRIO

DynamoRIO originated from a collaboration between MIT and Hewlett-Packard in 2001. HP Labs created the Dynamo system for PA-RISC in the 1990's. A port to IA-32 was begun in 2000 and continued in collaboration with the Runtime Introspection and Optimization (RIO) group at MIT. The name originated from combining Dynamo with RIO.

MIT Releases

Four versions were released to the public and hosted at MIT:

0.9.1: June 2002 (release coincided with a PLDI tutorial)
0.9.2: October 2002 (ASPLOS tutorial)
0.9.3: March 2003 (CGO tutorial)
0.9.4: February 2005

Determina

The DynamoRIO developers at MIT started a security company called Determina using the DynamoRIO software. Determina built its award-winning security products, the Memory Firewall and Vulnerability Protection Suite, on top of the DynamoRIO platform.

VMware Releases

VMware acquired DynamoRIO in 2007. Five versions were released from VMware on GoVirtual.org:

0.9.5: April 2008 (only released to a CGO tutorial audience)

1.0 (a.k.a 0.9.6): August 2008 (GoVirtual.org launch)

1.1: September 2008

1.2: October 2008

1.3: February 2009

Open-Source Releases

DynamoRIO was open-sourced and its code uploaded to Google Code in February 2009. Versions from 1.4 onward are hosted there.