Article

Tdb: a source-level debugger for dynamically translated programs

Authors:

Bruce R. Childers,

Mary Lou SoffaAuthors Info & Claims

AADEBUG'05: Proceedings of the sixth international symposium on Automated analysis-driven debugging

Pages 123 - 132

https://doi.org/10.1145/1085130.1085147

Published: 19 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Debugging techniques have evolved over the years in response to changes in programming languages, implementation techniques, and user needs. A new type of implementation vehicle for software has emerged that, once again, requires new debugging techniques. Software dynamic translation (SDT) has received much attention due to compelling applications of the technology, including software security checking, binary translation, and dynamic optimization. Using SDT, program code changes dynamically, and thus, debugging techniques developed for statically generated code cannot be used to debug these applications. In this paper, we describe a new debug architecture for applications executing with SDT systems. The architecture provides features that create the illusion that the source program is being debugged, while allowing the SDT system to modify the executing code. We incorporated this architecture in a new tool, called tdb, that integrates a SDT system, Strata, with a widely used debugger, gdb. We evaluated tdb in the context of a code security checker. The results show that a dynami-cally translated program can be debugged at the source level and that the approach does not overly increase the run-time perfor-mance or memory demands of the debugger.

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Cited By

Bruening DZhao QAmarasinghe S(2012)Transparent dynamic instrumentationACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2365864.215104347:7(133-144)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2365864.2151043
Bruening DZhao QAmarasinghe SHand Sda Silva D(2012)Transparent dynamic instrumentationProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/2151024.2151043(133-144)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2151024.2151043
Song MTilevich EArora SLeavens G(2009)Enhancing source-level programming tools with an awareness of transparent program transformationsProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications10.1145/1640089.1640112(301-320)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1640089.1640112
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Tdb: a source-level debugger for dynamically translated programs
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

AADEBUG'05: Proceedings of the sixth international symposium on Automated analysis-driven debugging

September 2005

172 pages

ISBN:1595930507

DOI:10.1145/1085130

General Chair:
Clinton Jeffery
New Mexico State University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Jong-Deok Choi
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
,
Raimondas Lencevicius
Nokia Research Center, USA

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 September 2005

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AADEBUG05

Sponsor:

AADEBUG05: AADEBUG '05 - Sixth International Symposium on Automated and Analysis Driven Debugging

September 19 - 21, 2005

California, Monterey, USA

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Citations

Cited By

Bruening DZhao QAmarasinghe S(2012)Transparent dynamic instrumentationACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2365864.215104347:7(133-144)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2365864.2151043
Bruening DZhao QAmarasinghe SHand Sda Silva D(2012)Transparent dynamic instrumentationProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/2151024.2151043(133-144)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2151024.2151043
Song MTilevich EArora SLeavens G(2009)Enhancing source-level programming tools with an awareness of transparent program transformationsProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications10.1145/1640089.1640112(301-320)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1640089.1640112
Song MTilevich E(2009)Enhancing source-level programming tools with an awareness of transparent program transformationsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1639949.164011244:10(301-320)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1639949.1640112
Kumar NChilders BSoffa M(2009)Transparent Debugging of Dynamically Optimized CodeProceedings of the 7th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO.2009.28(275-286)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO.2009.28
Zhao QRabbah RAmarasinghe SRudolph LWong W(2008)How to do a million watchpointsProceedings of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software 17th international conference on Compiler construction10.5555/1788374.1788388(147-162)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1788374.1788388
Zhao QRabbah RAmarasinghe SRudolph LWong W(2008)How to Do a Million Watchpoints: Efficient Debugging Using Dynamic InstrumentationCompiler Construction10.1007/978-3-540-78791-4_10(147-162)Online publication date: 2008
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78791-4_10
Eaddy MAho AHu WMcDonald PBurger J(2007)Debugging aspect-enabled programsProceedings of the 6th international conference on Software composition10.5555/1785051.1785074(200-215)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1785051.1785074
Eaddy MAho AHu WMcDonald PBurger J(2007)Debugging Aspect-Enabled ProgramsSoftware Composition10.1007/978-3-540-77351-1_17(200-215)Online publication date: 2007
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77351-1_17
Hiser JKumar NZhao MZhou SChilders BDavidson JSoffa M(2006)Techniques and tools for dynamic optimizationProceedings of the 20th international conference on Parallel and distributed processing10.5555/1898699.1898797(279-279)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1898699.1898797
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