Alligator in Vest: A Practical Failure-Diagnosis Framework via Arm Hardware Features

Zhang，Yiming1,2; Hu，Yuxin3; Li，Haonan3; Shi，Wenxuan3; Ning，Zhenyu3,4; Luo，Xiapu2; Zhang，Fengwei3

10.1145/3597926.3598106

2023

32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA)

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 32ND ACM SIGSOFT INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE TESTING AND ANALYSIS, ISSTA 2023

JUL 17-21, 2023

null,Seattle,WA

1601 Broadway, 10th Floor, NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

["Failure diagnosis in practical systems is difficult, and the main obstacle is that the information a developer has access to is limited. This information is usually not enough to help developers fix or even locate the related bug. Moreover, due to the vast difference between the development and production environments, it is not trivial to reproduce failures from the production environment in the development environment. When failures are caused by non-deterministic events such as race conditions or unforeseen inputs, reproducing them is even more challenging.","In this paper, we present Investigator, a failure diagnosis framework for practical systems running on Arm. At runtime, Investigator leverages the hardware tracing component called Embedded Trace Macrocell (ETM) and a lightweight event capturer to collect information with low overhead. With the collected trace and analysis, Investigator identifies the control and data flow related to the cause of a failure, which helps developers in bug fixing. We implemented a prototype of Investigator and evaluated it with real-world bugs. The results show that Investigator diagnoses these bugs effectively and efficiently while introducing a low performance overhead at runtime."]

ETM tracing Failure Diagnosis Debugging

第一

英语

EI ; CPCI-S

National Natural Science Foundation of China["62002151","62102175"]

Computer Science

Computer Science, Software Engineering ; Computer Science, Theory & Methods

WOS:001122661400074

Web of Science

1.Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems,Department of Cse,SUSTech,China
2.The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,China,Hong Kong
3.Southern University of Science and Technology,China
4.Hunan University,China

Zhang，Yiming,Hu，Yuxin,Li，Haonan,et al. Alligator in Vest: A Practical Failure-Diagnosis Framework via Arm Hardware Features[C]. 1601 Broadway, 10th Floor, NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES:ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY,2023.