Transparent, lightweight application execution replay on commodity multiprocessor operating systems

We present S, the first system to provide transparent, lowoverhead application record-replay and the ability to go live from replayed execution. S introduces new lightweight operating system mechanisms, rendezvous and sync points, to efficiently record nondeterministic interactions such as related system calls, signals, and shared memory accesses. Rendezvous points make a partial ordering of execution based on system call dependencies sufficient for replay, avoiding the recording overhead of maintaining an exact execution ordering. Sync points convert asynchronous interactions that can occur at arbitrary times into synchronous events that are much easier to record and replay. We have implemented S without changing, relinking, or recompiling applications, libraries, or operating system kernels, and without any specialized hardware support such as hardware performance counters. It works on commodity Linux operating systems, and commodity mul...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Oren Laadan, Nicolas Viennot, Jason Nieh
• Keywords: Hardware, Operating System Mechanism, Operating Systems, SIGMETRICS 2010, Sync Points