CAREER: Architectural Support for Automated Software Debugging

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

Given their ever increasing complexity, modern software systems are plagued with software defects, commonly known as bugs. It usually takes significant amount of efforts for software developers to locate the defects after a program failure is observed. Due to the limited on-chip resource at the time, traditional architectural support for debugging was limited to a basic set of primitive functions like breakpoints and watchpoints. With the advances in semiconductor technology, the resource constraint is less of a concern and much more powerful architectural support becomes possible to be implemented to ease software debugging. In this research, novel software-hardware integrated approaches are developed to automatically pinpoint software defects and the aim is to develop a computer that can automatically pinpoint the faulty code in either sequential or parallel programs and potentially generate a fix to the defect. Previous work on architectural support for debugging mainly focused on one aspect of debugging activities including faithfully reproducing program failures or detecting potential bugs. In comparison, this research introduces novel architectural support for: bug detection to report potential bugs, bug isolation to find the relevant bugs based on cause-effect relationship between the potential bugs and the program failure, and bug validation to generate quick fixes to the isolated bugs, thereby forming a complete process of automated debugging. Bugs in both sequential and parallel programs are the target in this research. For parallel programs, the research investigates thread interaction under the transactional memory programming model and develops novel automated debugging schemes for concurrency bugs. The research also includes the prototype of the novel architectural supports to evaluate their effectiveness with real-world applications.