Logging as as debug method is not new, and I have been writing about it to and from over the past few years myself. At the S4D conference, tracing and logging keeps coming up as a topic (see my reports from 2009, 2010 and 2012 ). I recently found an interesting piece on logging from the IT world in the ACM Queue (“Advances and Challenges in Log Analysis“, Adam Oliner, ACM Queue December 2011). Here, I want to address some of my current thoughts on the topic.
Tag: ACM Queue
The Adversarial Approach to Compilation
Paul Henning-Kamp has written a series of columns for the ACM Queue and Communications of the ACM. He is pointed, always controversial, and often quite funny. One recent column was called “The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake“, which discusses the bad design decision of using null-terminated strings (with the associated buffer overrun risks that would have been easily avoided with a length+data-style string format). Well worth a read. A key part of the article is the dual observation that compilers are starting to try to solve the efficiency problems of null-terminated strings – and that such heavily optimizing compilers quite often very hard to use.
Pulling the Virtual Ethernet Plug
I just read the panel interview at the start of the latest issue (Number 4, 2008) of ACM Queue. Here, you have Bryan Cantrill of Sun (the man behind dTrace) bemoan the difficulty of testing faults. In particular:
Part of the reason I’m interested in virtualization is as a development methodology. It has not delivered on this, but one of the things that I ask is can I use virtualization to automate someone pulling the Ethernet cable out of the jack? I can get a lot closer to simulating it if you let me create a toy virtual machine than I can running on the live machine.
Well, this already exists. It is a common feature to any virtual platform that is not a datacenter-oriented runtime engine like VmWare, Xen, LPAR, and its ilk. Doing fault injection is a primary use case for virtual platforms, especially for larger servers and systems featuring redundancy and fault tolerance.