record-replay – Observations from Uppsala

Undo Reverse Debugger “Pivots” to Record-Replay

I just found a story about Undo software that was rather interesting from a strategic perspective. “Patient capital from CIC gives ‘time travelling’ company Undo space to pivot“, from the BusinessWeekly in the UK. The article describes a change from selling to individual developers, towards selling to enterprises. This is an important business change, but it also marks I think a technology thinking shift: from single-session debug to record-replay.

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UndoDB Recording during Automatic Testing

UndoDB is an old player in the reverse debugging market, and have kept at it for ten years. Last year, they released the Live Recorder record-replay function. Most recently, they have showed an integration between the recorder function and Jenkins, where the idea is that you record failing runs in your CI system and replay them on the developer’s machine. Demo video is found on Youtube, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap8552P5vss.

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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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rr– The Mozilla Reverse Debugger

A new record, replay, and reverse debugger has appeared, and I just had to take a look at what they do and how they do it. “rr” has been developed by the Firefox developers at Mozilla Corporation, initially for the purpose of debugging Firefox itself. Starting at a debugger from the angle of attacking a particular program does let you get things going quickly, but the resulting tool is clearly generally useful, at least for Linux user-land programs on x86. Since I have tried to keep up with the developments in this field, a write-up seems to be called for.

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UndoDB Live Recorder: Record/Replay for Live Systems

I have a long-standing interested in debugging in general and reverse debugging in particular and the related idea of record-replay debug (see a series of blog posts I did a few years ago on the topic: history 1, history 2, history 3, S4D report, updates, Simics reverse execution, and then Lab Cloud record/replay). Recently, I found out that Undo Software, one of the pioneers in the field, had released a product called “Live Recorder“. So I went to check it out by reading their materials and comparing it to what we have seen before.

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Reverse History Part One

For some reason, when I think of reverse execution and debugging, the sound track that goes through my head is a UK novelty hit from 1987, “Star Trekkin” by the Firm. It contains the memorable line “we’re only going forward ’cause we can’t find reverse“. To me, that sums up the history of reverse debugging nicely. The only reason we are not all using it every day is that practical reverse debugging has not been available until quite recently. However, in the past ten years, I think we can say that software development has indeed found reverse. It took a while to get there, however. This is the first of a series of blog posts that will try to cover some of the history of reverse debugging. The text turned out to be so long that I had to break it up to make each post usefully short. Part two is about research, and part three about products.
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