Tralfamadore : memory reconstruction, declarative dependency resolution, and parallelism

• Main Author: Head, Christopher Charles David
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/39075

Tralfamadore is a platform for debugging and analyzing whole software systems, from the operating system up. Tralfamadore employs a novel mechanism for analysis in which, rather than interrupting and examining the system under test as it runs, the system is instead run to completion untouched then examined post-hoc. The system under test is run in a virtual machine which records its execution; analysis and debugging tools are then applied to the recorded execution trace data. Tralfamadore thus permits travelling both forward and backward through time while debugging, debugging systems that would not normally be able to be halted (such as those that communicate with time-sensitive external systems), and accurately reproducing a view of a system's execution even if that system has (maliciously or accidentally) corrupted its internal state. Tralfamadore also has a number of other potentially-interesting applications in aspect-oriented programming, forensic analysis, dynamic analysis, and customer-site bug reporting.