CSR-AES: Collaborative Research: Debugging Dynamic Code Modifications

随着软件复杂性的不断增长，出现了一个重要的要求，即软件必须能够在运行时进行更改。不幸的是，在构建健壮的、动态修改的软件方面有用的软件工程技术严重缺乏。一般来说，广泛的测试和调试是确保软件健壮性的传统方法。在底层代码在运行时更改的情况下调试程序的问题使问题变得更加困难。这项拟议的研究的目的是解决这种情况，并开发用于调试动态修改的软件的新技术。关键思想是，对这类软件的调试必须通过代码修改来扩展，并允许对已更改的代码进行调试，并查看过去和未来的适配如何影响执行。提出的工作考虑了几种类型的动态代码修改，包括动态优化的代码、动态应用的代码补丁、组件和动态链接库。将专门开发新的调试指令和查询，以解决调试此类代码的挑战。这项研究具有基础和软件两方面的贡献，包括：(1)更好地理解用于开发健壮的动态修改软件的约束和权衡；(2)支持构建在动态开发软件时有用的调试技术和工具；(3)开发设计用于处理动态修改代码的特殊挑战的调试策略、指令和查询；以及(4)为将广泛分布的动态软件开发一组调试工具。将在本研究过程中开发的技术、工具和算法将有助于理解现代软件开发技术如何与动态代码修改相结合。

As software continues to grow in complexity, an important requirement that is emerging is software must be able to change at run-time. Unfortunately, software engineering techniques that are useful in building robust dynamically modified software are woefully lacking. In general, extensive testing and debugging are the traditional ways of ensuring the robustness of sofware. The problem of debugging a program where the underlying code is changing at run-time makes the problem all the more difficult. The aim of this proposed research is to address this situation and develop new techniques for debugging dynamically modified software. The key idea is that debugging for such software must extend through the code modification and allow debugging on code that has been changed and to see how past and future adaptations has/can affect execution. The proposed work considers several types of dynamic code modifications, including dynamically optimized code, dynamically applied code patches, components and dynamically linked libraries. New debug directives and queries will be developed specifically to address the challenges of debugging such code. Novel techniques based on code analysis, reverse execution, checkpointing, and instrumentation optimization will be used to enable these new directives and queries.This research has both fundamental and software contributions, including: (1) a better understanding of the constraints and trade-offs that exist for developing robust dynamically modified software, (2) a framework that supports the construction of debugging techniques and tools that are useful when developing dynamically software, (3) the development of debug strategies, directives and queries that are designed to handle the special challenges of dynamically modified code, and (4) the development of a set of debugging tools for dynamic software that will be widely distributed. The techniques, tools and algorithms that will be developed through the course of this research will contribute significantly to understanding how modern software development techniques can be incorporated with dynamic code modifications.