IGOR: a system for program debugging via reversible execution
PADD '88 Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGPLAN and SIGOPS workshop on Parallel and distributed debugging
Debugging standard ML without reverse engineering
LFP '90 Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
Efficient algorithms for bidirectional debugging
PLDI '00 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2000 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Communications of the ACM
Debugging operating systems with time-traveling virtual machines
ATEC '05 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Flashback: a lightweight extension for rollback and deterministic replay for software debugging
ATEC '04 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications
AFIPS '70 (Spring) Proceedings of the May 5-7, 1970, spring joint computer conference
Tralfamadore: unifying source code and execution experience
Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems
Back to the Future: Omniscient Debugging
IEEE Software
DejaVu: integrated support for developing interactive camera-based programs
Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Expositor: scriptable time-travel debugging with first-class traces
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
Semi-automated debugging via binary search through a process lifetime
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Reversible debuggers have existed since the early 1970s. A novel approach, URDB, is introduced based on checkpoint/re-execute. It adds reversibility to a debugger, while still placing the end user within the familiar environment of their preferred debugger. The URDB software layer currently includes modes that understand the syntax for four debuggers: GDB for C/C++/Java/Fortran, Python (pdb), MATLAB, and Perl (perl -d). It does so by adding a thin URDB software layer on top of the DMTCP checkpoint-restart package. URDB passes native debugging commands between the end user and the underlying debugging session. URDB models the four common debugging primitives that form the basis for most debuggers: step, next, continue, break. For example, given a debugging history of the form [step, next, step], URDB's reverse-step produces a new history, [step, next]. Further, subtle algorithms are described for reverse-xxx. For example, reverse-step operates correctly when the last instruction of the history is next or continue. URDB calls DMTCP to create a checkpoint during a de-bugging session, and then replays the history from there. An essential novelty of this work is the extension of DMTCP to be the first checkpointing package capable of checkpointing a GDB sesssion to disk (through checkpointing the Linux ptrace system call). This was a significant barrier to earlier attempts toward checkpoint/re-execute for GDB. Support for the GDB debugger is important to any reversible debugger claiming universality. Experimental results are described for GDB, MATLAB, Python (pdb), and Perl.