PRACTICAL RECORD-AND-REPLAY DEBUGGING

Speaker: Robert O'Callahan , Mozilla Corporation

Date: Thursday, October 02, 2014

Time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Public: Yes

Location: 32-G882 (Hewlett Room)

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Host: Daniel Jackson, MIT-CSAIL

Contact: Maria Rebelo, 3-5895, mr@csail.mit.edu

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Reminder Subject: TALK: PRACTICAL RECORD-AND-REPLAY DEBUGGING

PRACTICAL RECORD-AND-REPLAY DEBUGGING

Robert O'Callahan, Mozilla Corporation

Mozilla's browser developers find debugging expensive and frustrating, especially when bugs are non-deterministic. Researchers have proposed to expedite debugging by recording, replaying and analyzing program executions, and in theory such techniques are well-understood, but they have not yet been widely adopted. Mozilla Research aims to understand and bridge this adoption gap by building a record-and-replay-based debugger that Mozilla's developers actually want to use. This talk will describe some barriers to adoption and how we have addressed them in the design and implementation of 'rr': a lightweight tool which can record unmodified Firefox binaries with less than 1.3x run-time overhead, and exactly replay those executions under the control of gdb --- using only standard Linux kernel APIs on stock hardware. 'rr' has been used to debug many real Firefox bugs. Furthermore it provides low-overhead recording, replaying and checkpointing of Linux processes in an open-source tool, opening up many interesting avenues for future work. I will also discuss some of the implications for hardware and software design as record-and-replay becomes more popular.

BIO: Robert O'Callahan is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla Corporation, focusing on the development of Web standards and their implementation in Firefox, with a particular focus on CSS, graphics and media APIs. He has a side interest in research on software development, and debugging in particular. 'rr' is the first research tool he ever built that he actually wants to use.

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This event is not part of a series.

Created by Maria Rebelo at Thursday, September 25, 2014 at 11:36 AM.