An Effective Parallel Program Debugging Approach Based on Timing Annotation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parallel program debugging method leveraging timing annotations to create a deterministic execution environment, simplifying debugging of concurrency bugs on multi-core platforms.

Contribution

It presents a novel debugging approach based on timing annotations derived from MCISS technology, enabling deterministic parallel program debugging.

Findings

Constructed a deterministic execution environment for parallel debugging

Modified QEMU and GDB to implement the approach

Debugger usage is nearly identical to conventional GDB

Abstract

We propose an effective parallel program debugging approach based on the timing annotation technique. With prevalent multi-core platforms, parallel programming is required to fully utilize the computing power. However, the non-determinism property and the associated concurrency bugs are notorious and remain to be great challenge to designers. We hence propose an effective program debugging approach using the timing annotation technique derived from the deterministic Multi-Core Instruction Set Simulation (MCISS) technology. We hence construct a deterministic execution environment for parallel program debugging and devise a few unique, effective and easy-to-use parallel debugging functions. We modify QEMU and GDB to implement and demonstrate our proposed idea. The usage of our debugger is almost identical to the conventional GDB debugger. Therefore, users may learn how to use the tool seamlessly.