ORDER: object centric deterministic replay for Java

• Authors: Zhemin Yang;Min Yang;Lvcai Xu;Haibo Chen;Binyu Zang
• Venue: USENIXATC'11 Proceedings of the 2011 USENIX conference on USENIX annual technical conference
• Year: 2011

Deterministic replay systems, which record and replay non-deterministic events during program execution, have many applications such as bug diagnosis, intrusion analysis and fault tolerance. It is well understood how to replay native (e.g., C) programs on multi-processors, while there is little work for concurrent java applications on multicore. State-of-the-art work for Java either assumes data-race free execution, or relies on static instrumentation, which leads to missing some necessary nondeterministic events. This paper proposes the ORDER framework to record and reproduce non-deterministic events inside Java virtual machine (JVM). Based on observations of good locality at object level for threads and frequent object movements due to garbage collection, ORDER records and replays non-deterministic data accesses by logging and enforcing the order in which threads access objects. This essentially eliminates unnecessary dependencies introduced by address changes of objects during garbage collection and enjoys good locality as well as less contention, which may result in scalable performance on multicore. Further, by dynamically instrumenting Java code in the JVM compilation pipeline, ORDER naturally covers non-determinism in dynamically loaded classes. We have implemented ORDER based on Apache Harmony. Evaluation on SPECjvm2008, PseudoJBB2005, and JRuby shows that ORDER only incurs 108% performance overhead on average and scales well on a 16-core Xeon testbed. Evaluation with a real-world application, JRuby, shows that several real-world concurrency bugs can be successfully reproduced.