Angel Manuel Bravo Gestoso

Fault Reproduction for Multithreaded Applications

Tese submetida para provas de mestrado em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.

Abstract

Writing distributed and parallel applications is rather difficult. Because of this difficulty, many bugs appear during development and frequently, on deployed applications. Classical debugging techniques are not enough anymore because of the non-determinism induced by this kind of applications. Record and replay techniques have been created in order to help developers. These techniques are composed by two main phases. The record phase captures all non-deterministic events of the execution. Then, during the replay phase, the original execution can be repeated in order to find the causes of the bugs. Unfortunately, tracing all non-deterministic events introduces a large overhead. This thesis presents Symber, a record and replay tool for multithreaded Java applications that combines partial logging with an inference mechanism based on symbolic execution. Thus, Symber is able to reduce the overhead introduced by only logging the local execution path and the order in which the locks are acquired. Our results demonstrate that Symber produces a competitive overhead in comparison to other tech- niques and still maintains the ability to efficiently replay concurrency bugs.

Publicações

Fault Reproduction for Multithreaded Applications
Angel Manuel Bravo Gestoso
MSc Thesis. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.
July, 2013.
Available BibTeX, MSC Thesis, and extended abstract of the thesis.
Reprodução de Erros de Concorrência em Aplicações Java Através de Execução Simbólica.
M. Bravo, N. Machado and L. Rodrigues.
Actas do quinto Simpósio de Informática (Inforum), Évora, Portugal, Sep, 2013
Prémio melhor artigo de estudante INForum 2013.
Available BibTeX, extended report (pdf).
Towards Effective and Efficient Search-Based Deterministic Replay.
M. Bravo, N. Machado, P. Romano, and L. Rodrigues.
The 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Dependable Systems, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort (PA), USA. November 3, 2013.
Luís Rodrigues