NDLI: iWatcher: efficient architectural support for software debugging

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Pin Zhou Feng Qin Wei Liu Yuanyuan Zhou Torrellas, J.
Copyright Year	2004
Description	Author affiliation: Dept. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA (Pin Zhou; Feng Qin; Wei Liu; Yuanyuan Zhou; Torrellas, J.)
Abstract	Recent impressive performance improvements in computer architecture have not led to significant gains in ease of debugging. Software debugging often relies on inserting run-time software checks. In many cases, however, it is hard to find the root cause of a bug. Moreover, program execution typically slows down significantly, often by 10-100 times. To address this problem, this paper introduces the Intelligent Watcher (iWatcher), novel architectural support to monitor dynamic execution with minimal overhead, automatically, and flexibly. iWatcher associates program-specified monitoring functions with memory locations. When any such location is accessed, the monitoring function is automatically triggered with low overhead. To further reduce overhead and support rollback, iWatcher can leverage Thread-Level Speculation (TLS). To test iWatcher, we use applications with various bugs. Our results show that iWatcher detects many more software bugs than Valgrind, a well-known open-source bug detector. Moreover, iWatcher only induces a 4-80% execution overhead, which is orders of magnitude less than Valgrind. Even with 20% of the dynamic loads monitored in a program, iWatcher adds only 66-174% overhead. Finally, TLS is effective at reducing overheads for programs with substantial monitoring.
Sponsorship	ACM SIGARCH IEEE Comput. Soc. TCCA
Starting Page	224
Ending Page	235
File Size	532214
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISBN	0769521436
ISSN	10636897
DOI	10.1109/ISCA.2004.1310777
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2004-06-23
Publisher Place	Germany
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Software debugging Computerized monitoring Computer bugs Open source software Computer architecture Performance gain Runtime Testing Application software Detectors
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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