Auckland University rr Talk Next Week

I'm scheduled to give a talk at Auckland University next Wednesday on rr.

25 March 2015

12 - 1pm

Venue: 303S - 561, City Campus

Host: Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland

Note: Informal discussion and light refreshments 1 - 2 pm

Speaker: Dr Robert O'Callahan

Abstract: Mozilla's browser developers find debugging expensive and frustrating, especially when bugs are non-deterministic. Researchers have proposed to expedite debugging by recording, replaying and analyzing program executions, and in theory such techniques are well-understood, but they have not yet been widely adopted. Mozilla Research aims to understand and bridge this adoption gap by building a record-and-replay-based debugger that Mozilla's developers actually want to use. This talk will describe some barriers to adoption and how we have addressed them in the design and implementation of 'rr': a lightweight tool which can record unmodified Firefox binaries with less than 1.3x run-time overhead, exactly replay those executions under the control of gdb, and emulate reverse-execution --- using only standard Linux kernel APIs on stock hardware. 'rr' has been used to debug many real Firefox bugs. Furthermore it provides low-overhead recording, replaying, checkpointing and reverse-execution of Linux processes in an open-source tool, opening up many interesting avenues for future work. I will also discuss some of the implications for hardware and software design as record-and-replay becomes more popular.

Bio: Robert O'Callahan is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla Corporation, focusing on the development of Web standards and their implementation in Firefox, with a particular focus on CSS, graphics and media APIs. He has a side interest in research on software development, and debugging in particular. 'rr' is the first research tool he ever built that he actually wants to use.