End-User Tracing for Software Replay

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Software bugs currently cause the large majority of computer failures.Unfortunately, the current culture of software development tolerates therelease of software with numerous bugs. The best solution to this phenomenonis more thorough testing. This project seeks to increase the amount of testingand effective debugging undergone by modern software. This research enablesend users to serve as effective testers by tracing a program's executionautomatically and submitting the trace as a bug report. Such traces containall information needed for the software developer to reproduce the failure,even if that failure is non-deterministic. The goals of this trace-and-replaysystem reflect the end-user environment it is targeted for. The tracing systemshould have low-enough overhead to be left on during normal use. The tracingsystem should translate or encode the trace to maintain the user's privacy.The trace-and-replay system should be easy to use by the end user; for example,it should not need to modify the kernel or system libraries. If successful,the resulting system will dramatically increase the base of effective testersand hopefully result in more reliable software.