Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Saturday 4 February 2017

rr 4.5.0 Released

We just released rr 4.5.0. Massive thanks to Keno Fischer who probably contributed more to this release than anyone else.

This is another incremental release. rr is already pretty good at what it does --- single-core recording, replaying, and debugging with gdb and reverse execution. The incremental nature of recent releases reflects that. It's still a significant amount of work to keep updating rr to fix bugs and cope with new kernel and hardware features as they start getting used by applications. Notably, this release adds support for Intel Knights Landing and Kaby Lake CPUs, contains a workaround for a regression caused by a Linux kernel security fix, and adds support for recording software using Hardware Lock Elision (and includes detection of a KVM bug that breaks our HLE support). This release also contains a fix that enables recording of Go programs.

We have some encouraging reports of rr adoption and rr users pretty much ceasing use of standalone gdb. However, rr definitely needs more users. When hardware and OS issues crop up, the bigger the user-base, the easier it will be to get the attention of the people whose cooperation we need. So, if you're a happy rr user and you want to help make sure rr doesn't stop working one day, please spread the word :-).

Let me say a tiny little bit about future plans. I plan to keep maintaining rr --- with the help of Keno and Kyle and other people in the community. I don't plan to add major new user-facing functionality to rr (i.e. going beyond gdb), but rather build such things as separate projects on top of rr. rr has a stable-in-practice C++ API that's amenable to supporting alternative debugger implementations, and I'd be happy to help people build on it. I've built but not yet released a framework that uses parts of DynamoRio to enable low-overhead binary instrumentation of rr replays; I plan to keep that closed at least until we have money coming in. The one major improvement that we expect we'll add to rr some time this year is reworking trace storage to enable easy trace portability and fix some existing issues.