CSR-AES: Collaborative Research: Debugging Dynamic Code Modifications

随着软件复杂性的不断增长，一个重要的需求是软件必须能够在运行时更改。不幸的是，软件工程技术，是有用的，在建立强大的动态修改的软件是可悲的缺乏。一般来说，广泛的测试和调试是保证软件健壮性的传统方法。调试一个底层代码在运行时发生变化的程序的问题使这个问题变得更加困难。这项研究的目的是解决这种情况，并开发新的技术调试动态修改的软件。关键思想是，对此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调整如何影响执行。拟议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。基于代码分析、反向执行、检查点和插装优化的新技术将用于实现这些新指令和查询。这项研究具有基础和软件贡献，包括：（1）更好地理解开发健壮的动态修改软件所存在的约束和权衡，（2）支持调试技术和工具的构造的框架，所述调试技术和工具在动态开发软件时是有用的，（3）调试策略的开发，指令和查询，旨在处理动态修改代码的特殊挑战，以及（4）开发一套调试工具，用于广泛分布的动态软件。技术，工具和算法，将通过本研究的过程中开发将有助于理解现代软件开发技术如何可以与动态代码修改。

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.