CAREER: Architectural Support for Automated Software Debugging

职业：自动化软件调试的架构支持

• 批准号: 0747062
• 负责人: Huiyang Zhou
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: The University of Central Florida Board of Trustees
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-05-01 至 2010-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0747062&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Architectural; Support; Automated; Software

Given their ever increasing complexity, modern software systems are plagued with software defects, commonly known as bugs. It usually takes significant amount of efforts for software developers to locate the defects after a program failure is observed. Due to the limited on-chip resource at the time, traditional architectural support for debugging was limited to a basic set of primitive functions like breakpoints and watchpoints. With the advances in semiconductor technology, the resource constraint is less of a concern and much more powerful architectural support becomes possible to be implemented to ease software debugging. In this research, novel software-hardware integrated approaches are developed to automatically pinpoint software defects and the aim is to develop a computer that can automatically pinpoint the faculty code in either sequential or parallel programs and potentially generate a fix to the defect.Previous work on architectural support for debugging mainly focused on one aspect of debugging activities including faithfully reproducing program failures or detecting potential bugs. In comparison, this research introduces novel architectural support for: bug detection to report potential bugs, bug isolation to find the relevant bugs based on cause-effect relationship between the potential bugs and the program failure, and bug validation to generate quick fixes to the isolated bugs, thereby forming a complete process of automated debugging. Bugs in both sequential and parallel programs are the target in this research. For parallel programs, the research investigates thread interaction under the transactional memory programming model and develops novel automated debugging schemes for concurrency bugs. The research also includes the prototype of the novel architectural supports to evaluate their effectiveness with real-world applications.

鉴于其日益增加的复杂性，现代软件系统受到软件缺陷（通常称为错误）的困扰。在发现程序故障后，软件开发人员通常需要花费大量的精力来定位缺陷。由于当时片上资源有限，传统架构对调试的支持仅限于一组基本的原语函数，例如断点和观察点。随着半导体技术的进步，资源限制不再是问题，并且可以实现更强大的架构支持以简化软件调试。在这项研究中，开发了新颖的软件-硬件集成方法来自动查明软件缺陷，目的是开发一种能够自动查明顺序或并行程序中的教师代码并可能生成缺陷修复程序的计算机。对调试的体系结构支持主要集中在调试活动的一方面，包括忠实地再现程序故障或检测潜在的错误。相比之下，本研究引入了新颖的架构支持：错误检测以报告潜在错误，错误隔离以根据潜在错误与程序故障之间的因果关系查找相关错误，以及错误验证以生成对隔离的快速修复bug，从而形成一个完整的自动化调试流程。顺序和并行程序中的错误是本研究的目标。对于并行程序，该研究研究了事务内存编程模型下的线程交互，并针对并发错误开发了新颖的自动调试方案。该研究还包括新型建筑支撑的原型，以评估其在实际应用中的有效性。