The discover –i ADI tool (or libdiscoverADI.so library) is a security feature in Oracle Developer Studio which utilizes the SPARC M7 hardware for fixing the errant code easily. It prevents malicious software attacks and other memory corruption issues by locating the errant code earlier on.
To prevent such memory corruption, discover ADI interposes the production code, checking version numbers or colors that are assigned to the application's memory pointers with the pointer associated with the content's version number. If the pointer version number and content version number do not match, discover ADI reports an error. This hardware-assisted checking allows the user to detect buffer overflower, freed pointer, and stale pointer errors. discover ADI then reports the exact source lines (when compiled with the –g option) and stack traces of the errors so that the user can remediate the errant code before continuing execution. It also reports the allocation and free point stack traces of the errors. There is no code instrumentation or rebuild step required. For more information, see Hardware-Assisted Checking Using Silicon Secured Memory (SSM) in Oracle Developer Studio 12.6: Discover and Uncover User’s Guide.
If an application has its own memory allocator and does not call malloc(), the user can use the new APIs provided by the discover ADI tool. To view these new APIs, see Custom Memory Allocators and the discover ADI Library in Oracle Developer Studio 12.6: Discover and Uncover User’s Guide. These APIs are also available in the libdiscoverADI.so library or the libaidiplugin.3 man page.