Peeking into the Past: Efficient Checkpoint-Assisted Time-Traveling Debugging
Armando Miraglia, Dirk Vogt, Herbert Bos, Andy Tanenbaum, Cristiano Giuffrida · 2016
Debugging long-lived latent software bugs that manifest themselves only long after their introduction in the system is hard. Even state-of-the-artrecord/replay debugging techniques are of limited use to identify the rootcause of long-lived latent bugs in general and event-driven bugs in particular. We propose DeLorean, a new end-to-end solution for time-travelling debugging based on fast memory checkpointing. Our design trades off replay guarantees with efficient support for history-aware debug queries (or time-travelling introspection) and provides novel analysis tools to diagnose event-driven latent software bugs. DeLorean imposes low run-time performance and memory overhead while preserving in memory as much history information as possible by deduplicating and/or compressing the collected data. We evaluate DeLorean byextensive experimentation, exploring the performance-memory tradeoffs in different configurations and comparing our results against state-of-the-art solutions. We show that DeLorean can efficiently support high-frequency checkpoints and store millions of them in memory.