Facing the Challenge of Nondeterminism in MPSoC Debugging

Submitted to the JSA Elsevier JournalThis paper investigates the application of Deterministic Record Replay (DRR) to the problem ofsoftware debugging on modern nondeterministic MPSoC architectures. It presents a taxonomy of existing approaches and reports on our experience in implementinga DRR-based debugger. Identifying MPSoC specific debugging needs, the ReDSoCprototype defines a general debugging methodology to focus and zoom on problematic zones.Its successful application in the case of multimedia applications running on real platforms puts forward the importance of DRR for MPSoC debugging while pinpointing the majorreasons hindering its larger use