A New Approach To Debugging
I have built a system, which I'm calling Amber, to record the complete execution history of arbitrary Linux processes. The history is recorded using binary instrumentation based on Valgrind. The history is indexed to support efficient queries that debuggers need, and then compressed and written to disk in a format optimized for later query and retrieval. The history supports efficient reconstruction of the contents of any memory location or register at any point in time. It also supports efficient answers to "when was the last write to location X before time T", "when was location P executed between times T1 and T2", and other kinds of queries. I can record the 4.1 billion instructions of a Firefox debug build starting up, displaying a Web page, and exiting; the compressed, indexed trace is about 0.83 bytes per instruction executed." (Thanks to Jerome Lacoste.)
Posted Jan 4, 2007 15:52 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
Shame. Sounded lovely, but now nobody else can implement anything
Posted May 8, 2007 5:17 UTC (Tue)
by dberkholz (guest, #23346)
[Link]
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2007/02/misce...
Posted Jul 7, 2007 5:51 UTC (Sat)
by lamikr (guest, #2289)
[Link]
http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/
Mika
It's patented (thanks for nothing, Novell) and not yet free.A New Approach To Debugging
similar :(
Novell's going to let him release it as open source --A New Approach To Debugging
How this can be patented as Bil Levis has demonstrated the A New Approach To Debugging
exactly similar features with his open source omniscient Java debugger for years.