research-article

Facilitating unreachable code diagnosis and debugging

Authors:

Sy-Yen KuoAuthors Info & Claims

ASPDAC '11: Proceedings of the 16th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

Pages 485 - 490

Published: 25 January 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Code coverage is a popular method to find design bugs and verification loopholes. However, once a piece of code is determined to be unreachable, diagnosing the cause of the problem can be challenging: since the code is unreachable, no counterexample can be returned for debugging. Therefore, engineers need to analyze the legality of nonexistent execution paths, which can be difficult. To address such a problem, we analyzed the cause of unreachability in several industrial designs and proposed a diagnosis technique that can explain the cause of unreachability. In addition, our method provides suggestions on how to solve the un-reachability problem, which can further facilitate debugging. Our experimental results show that this technique can greatly reduce an engineer's effort in analyzing unreachable code.

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Cited By

Berryhill RVeneris ANebel WAtienza D(2015)Automated rectification methodologies to functional state-space unreachabilityProceedings of the 2015 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition10.5555/2755753.2757138(1401-1406)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2755753.2757138
Eichberg MHermann BMezini MGlanz LDi Nitto EHarman MHeymans P(2015)Hidden truths in dead software pathsProceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2786805.2786865(474-484)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786805.2786865

Index Terms

Facilitating unreachable code diagnosis and debugging

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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 support for repeatedly stumbling on the same bug does not help diagnose it. For ...

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Information

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cover image ACM Conferences

ASPDAC '11: Proceedings of the 16th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

January 2011

841 pages

ISBN:9781424475162

Sponsors

IEEE
IPSJ
SIGDA: ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation
IEICE ESS: Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Engineering Sciences Society
IEICE

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 25 January 2011

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Research-article

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ASPDAC '11

Sponsor:

SIGDA
IEICE ESS

ASPDAC '11: 16th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

January 25 - 28, 2011

Yokohama, Japan

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Overall Acceptance Rate 466 of 1,454 submissions, 32%

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Cited By

Berryhill RVeneris ANebel WAtienza D(2015)Automated rectification methodologies to functional state-space unreachabilityProceedings of the 2015 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition10.5555/2755753.2757138(1401-1406)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2755753.2757138
Eichberg MHermann BMezini MGlanz LDi Nitto EHarman MHeymans P(2015)Hidden truths in dead software pathsProceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2786805.2786865(474-484)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786805.2786865

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