qemu – Observations from Uppsala

DVCon Europe 2023 – 10th Anniversary Edition

The 2023 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on November 14 and 15, in the traditional location of the Holiday Inn Munich City Center. This was the 10^th time the conference took place, serving as an excuse for a great anniversary dinner. Also new was the addition of a research track to provide academics publishing at the conference with the academic credit their work deserves. This year had a large number of papers related to virtual platforms, so writing this report has taken me longer than usual. There was just so much to cover.

DVCon Europe 2022. Verification, System Simulation, and People!

The 2022 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference was back in physical form at its usual venue at the Holiday Inn München. It was a great conference, and just like at the 2022 DAC people were very happy to be back in person.

Reverse Debug with Hardware in the Loop

Last year (2015), a paper called “Don’t Panic: Reverse Debugging of Kernel Drivers” was presented at the ESEC/FSE (European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering) conference. The paper was written by Pavel Dovgalyuk, Denis Dmitriev, and Vladimir Makarov from the Russian Academy of Sciences. It describes a rather interesting approach to Linux kernel device driver debug, using a deterministic variant of Qemu along with record/replay of hardware interactions. I think this is the first published instance of using reverse debugging in a simulator together with real hardware.

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Reverse History Part Two – Research

This is the second post in my series on the history of reverse execution, covering various early research papers. It is clear that reverse debugging has been considered a good idea for a very long time. Sadly though, not a practical one (at the time). The idea is too obvious to be considered new. Here are some of the papers that I have found, going back before reverse debugging got started for real in actual products (around 2003) as well later on for interesting research papers that did not make it into products. It is worth noting that products/useful software has become more common in recent times as the way that reverse debugging ideas get expressed.

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