Cores, Debugging, and Coverage

This research was conducted by Peter Ohmann and Ben Liblit.

Abstract

Debugging is difficult and costly, especially for production failures. To aid developers, we enhance core memory dumps produced by crashing applications with lightweight, tunable tracing. We propose two complementary forms of tracing, path traces and global coverage, and demonstrate that they can provide substantial postmortem analysis benefit at low cost. Recent work focuses on the interplay of these mechanisms, and comparison of various forms of coverage data.

Full Paper

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