Improving the performance of reverse debugging

Reverse debugging is the software development technique that effectively helps fix bugs occurring at the nondeterministic program behavior. It allows one to examine the past states of the program without rerunning it. An implementation of reverse debugging based on deterministic replay in the QEMU 2...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Programming and computer software Vol. 43; no. 1; pp. 60 - 66
Main Authors: Klimushenkova, M. A., Dovgalyuk, P. M.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Moscow Pleiades Publishing 01.01.2017
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science
Debugging
Emulators
Linux
Operating Systems
Software
Software development
Software Engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
ISSN:0361-7688, 1608-3261
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Reverse debugging is the software development technique that effectively helps fix bugs occurring at the nondeterministic program behavior. It allows one to examine the past states of the program without rerunning it. An implementation of reverse debugging based on deterministic replay in the QEMU 2.0 emulator is described. A number of techniques improving the debugging performance due to reducing the amount of saved data, optimized storage of system snapshots, indexing, and compressing of the event log are proposed. The emulator can work together with the interactive GDB debugger, which makes it possible to use the reverse-continue, reverse-nexti, reverse-stepi and reverse-finish commands in the course of debugging. The execution time of these commands depends on the frequency of recording the system’s state snapshots. An estimate of the optimal frequency for the reverse-continue command is obtained.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:0361-7688
1608-3261
DOI:10.1134/S0361768817010042