A "Flight Data Recorder" for Enabling Full-System Multiprocessor Deterministic Replay

Debuggers have been proven indispensable in improving software reliability. Unfortunately, on most real-life software, debuggers fail to deliver their most essential feature — a faithful replay of the execution. The reason is non-determinism caused by multithreading and nonrepeatable inputs. A common solution to faithful replay has been to record the non-deterministic execution. Existing recorders, however, either work only for data-race-free programs or have prohibitive overhead. As a step towards powerful debugging, we develop a practical low-overhead hardware recorder for cachecoherent multiprocessors, called Flight Data Recorder (FDR). Like an aircraft flight data recorder, FDR continuously records the execution, even on deployed systems, logging the execution for post-mortem analysis. FDR is practical because it piggybacks on the cache coherence hardware and logs nearly the minimal threadordering information necessary to faithfully replay the multiprocessor execution. Our stud...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Min Xu, Rastislav Bodík, Mark D. Hill
• Keywords: Data Recorder, Faithful Replay, Hardware, ISCA 2003, Non-deterministic Execution