Replay Debugging: Leveraging Record and Replay for Program Debugging ∗

Hardware-assisted Record and Deterministic Replay (RnR) of programs has been proposed as a primitive for debugging hard-to-repeat software bugs. However, simply providing sup-port for repeatedly stumbling on the same bug does not help diagnose it. For bug diagnosis, developers typically want to modify the code, e.g., by creating and operating on new vari-ables, or printing state. Unfortunately, this renders the RnR log inconsistent and makes Replay Debugging (i.e., debugging while using an RnR log for replay) dicey at best. This paper presents rdb, the first scheme for replay debug-ging that guarantees exact replay. rdb relies on two mech-anisms. The first one is compiler support to split the instru-mented application into two executables: one that is identical to the original program binary, and another that encapsulates all the added debug code. The second mechanism is a runtime infrastructure that replays the application and, without affect-ing it in any way, invokes the appropriate debug code at the appropriate locations. We describe an implementation of rdb based on LLVM and Pin, and show an example of how rdb’s replay debugging helps diagnose a real bug. 1