Rewriting Every Syscall in a Linux Binary at Load Time

Good question. I didn't cover this in the post — the binary doesn't run on the host kernel directly. It runs inside a lightweight KVM-based VM with no operating system. The shim is the only thing handling syscalls inside the guest. So strace on the host wouldn't see anything — no syscalls reach the host kernel from the guest. From the host side, the only visible activity is the hypervisor process making syscalls on behalf of the guest.

Inside the guest, there's no kernel to attach strace to — the shim IS the syscall handler. But we do have full observability: every syscall that hits the shim is logged to a trace ring buffer with the syscall number, arguments, and TSC timestamp. It's more complete than strace in some ways — you see denied calls too, with the policy verdict, and there's no observer overhead because the logging is part of the dispatch path.

So existing tools don't work, but you get something arguably better: a complete, tamper-proof record of every syscall the process attempted, including the ones that were denied before they could execute. I'll publish a follow-on tomorrow that details how we load and execute this rewritten binary and what the VMM architecture looks like.