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USENIX 2004 Annual Technical Conference, General Track — Abstract
Pp. 29–44 of the Proceedings
Flashback: A Lightweight Extension for Rollback and Deterministic Replay for Software Debugging
Sudarshan M. Srinivasan, Srikanth Kandula, Christopher R. Andrews, and Yuanyuan Zhou, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
Software robustness has significant impact on system availability.
Unfortunately, finding software bugs is a very challenging task
because many bugs are hard to reproduce.
While debugging a program, it would be very useful to rollback a
crashed program to a previous execution point and deterministically
re-execute the ``buggy'' code region.
However, most previous work on rollback and replay support was
designed to survive hardware or operating system failures, and is
therefore too heavy-weight for the fine-grained rollback and replay
needed for software debugging.
This paper presents Flashback, a lightweight OS extension that
provides fine-grained rollback and replay to help debug
software. Flashback uses shadow processes to efficiently roll back
in-memory state of a process, and logs a process' interactions with
the system to support deterministic replay. Both shadow processes and
logging of system calls are implemented in a lightweight fashion
specifically designed for the purpose of software debugging.
We have implemented a prototype of Flashback in the Linux operating
system. Our experimental results with micro-benchmarks and real
applications show that Flashback adds little overhead and can quickly
roll back a debugged program to a previous execution point and
deterministically replay from that point.
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