Debug determinism: the sweet spot for replay-based debugging

Deterministic replay tools offer a compelling approach to debugging hard-to-reproduce bugs. Recent work on relaxed-deterministic replay techniques shows that re-play debugging with low in-production overhead is pos-sible. However, despite considerable progress, a replay-debugging system that offers not only low in-production runtime overhead but also high debugging utility, re-mains out of reach. To this end, we argue that the re-search community should strive for debug determinism —a new determinism model premised on the idea that effective debugging entails reproducing the same failure and the same root cause as the original execution. We present ideas on how to achieve and quantify debug de-terminism and give preliminary evidence that a debug-deterministic system has potential to provide both low in-production overhead and high debugging utility.