CSR-AES: Collaborative Research: Debugging Dynamic Code Modifications

CSR-AES：协作研究：调试动态代码修改

• 批准号: 0509115
• 负责人: Bruce Childers
• 金额: $ 8.99万
• 依托单位: University of Pittsburgh
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-08-01 至 2007-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0509115&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; AES; Collaborative; Research; Debugging

As software continues to grow in complexity, an important requirement that is emerging is software must be able to change at run-time. Unfortunately, software engineering techniques that are useful in building robust dynamically modified software are woefully lacking. In general, extensive testing and debugging are the traditional ways of ensuring the robustness of sofware. The problem of debugging a program where the underlying code is changing at run-time makes the problem all the more difficult. The aim of this proposed research is to address this situation and develop new techniques for debugging dynamically modified software. The key idea is that debugging for such software must extend through the code modification and allow debugging on code that has been changed and to see how past and future adaptations has/can affect execution. The proposed work considers several types of dynamic code modifications, including dynamically optimized code, dynamically applied code patches, components and dynamically linked libraries. New debug directives and queries will be developed specifically to address the challenges of debugging such code. Novel techniques based on code analysis, reverse execution, checkpointing, and instrumentation optimization will be used to enable these new directives and queries.This research has both fundamental and software contributions, including: (1) a better understanding of the constraints and trade-offs that exist for developing robust dynamically modified software, (2) a framework that supports the construction of debugging techniques and tools that are useful when developing dynamically software, (3) the development of debug strategies, directives and queries that are designed to handle the special challenges of dynamically modified code, and (4) the development of a set of debugging tools for dynamic software that will be widely distributed. The techniques, tools and algorithms that will be developed through the course of this research will contribute significantly to understanding how modern software development techniques can be incorporated with dynamic code modifications.

随着软件的复杂性不断增加，出现的一个重要要求是软件必须能够在运行时进行更改。不幸的是，可用于构建健壮的动态修改软件的软件工程技术却严重缺乏。一般来说，广泛的测试和调试是确保软件稳健性的传统方法。调试底层代码在运行时发生变化的程序的问题使得问题变得更加困难。本研究的目的是解决这种情况并开发调试动态修改软件的新技术。关键思想是，此类软件的调试必须扩展到代码修改，并允许对已更改的代码进行调试，并了解过去和未来的调整如何影响执行。所提出的工作考虑了几种类型的动态代码修改，包括动态优化代码、动态应用代码补丁、组件和动态链接库。新的调试指令和查询将专门开发来解决调试此类代码的挑战。基于代码分析、反向执行、检查点和仪器优化的新技术将用于实现这些新指令和查询。这项研究具有基础和软件贡献，包括：（1）更好地理解约束和权衡用于开发健壮的动态修改软件的框架，(2) 支持构建动态开发软件时有用的调试技术和工具的框架，(3) 开发旨在处理特殊情况的调试策略、指令和查询动态修改代码的挑战，以及 (4)开发一套用于动态软件的调试工具，并将其广泛分发。通过本研究过程开发的技术、工具和算法将极大地有助于理解现代软件开发技术如何与动态代码修改相结合。