Improving Systems Reliability Through Record/Replay

通过记录/重放提高系统可靠性

• 批准号: RGPIN-2018-04512
• 负责人: Mashtizadeh, Ali
• 金额: $ 2.04万
• 依托单位: University of Waterloo
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=658962
• 关键词: Improving; Systems; Reliability; Through; Record

Software bugs significantly hamper software reliability leading to service outages, data loss, and security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, most production software failures go undiagnosed. This occurs for two reasons. First, the sheer number of crashes in widely used software – for example, Microsoft reported seeing over a million crashes a day in one recent publication and staff at Mozilla reported to us they see tens of thousands of crashes a day. Second, current crash reporting technologies, such as core dumps and stack traces, provide very little context. Consequently, automatically grouping (i.e., the set of crashes caused by the same bug), diagnosing (i.e., this is a concurrency bug, buffer overflow, etc.), and prioritizing bugs (i.e., whether a bug is potentially exploitable) has been impractical.******To address this, we have been building a toolchain that allows developers to record and replay production applications, called Castor. Castor has several goals. First, we are attempting to provide a platform for application record/replay with low enough performance and space overhead to make it practical to leave on by default in production, capturing bugs when they occur. In prior work, we have shown that it is possible to record even the most demanding multi-core scientific and server workloads with CPU overheads of a few percent. Moving forward, we hope to demonstrate new techniques to achieve this with modest space overheads and explore new approaches to bug triage and diagnosis that this can enable.******The primary objective of this research proposal is to improve developer tools such that no crash is left undiagnosed. We want to continue building on our record/replay work, improving its core capabilities in terms of usability, performance and space efficiency, and to use it in conjunction with dynamic analysis, program slicing, and other techniques to develop better tools for grouping, diagnosing and prioritizing bugs automatically.******A secondary objective is to explore alternative uses of record/replay. First, we will study techniques to generate a cycle-accurate replay good enough for any performance analysis tools. Second, we want to investigate helping developers automatically create fault tolerant processes that support tolerating non-fail-stop errors. Related to this we can extend the ideas to make fault tolerant software robust to exploits with little to no overhead.******This research program will contribute to my broader research goal of improving systems reliability in a world ever more dependent on computers. We will have the opportunity to make an impact in the way software is developed and maintained. It will also provide a rich training ground for HQP in a field that is in high demand in Canada.

软件bug会严重影响软件的可靠性，导致服务中断、数据丢失和安全漏洞。不幸的是，大多数生产软件的故障都没有被诊断出来。出现这种情况有两个原因。首先，广泛使用的软件崩溃的绝对数量——例如，微软在最近的一份出版物中报告说，他们每天看到超过100万次崩溃，Mozilla的员工向我们报告说，他们每天看到数万次崩溃。其次，当前的崩溃报告技术，如核心转储和堆栈跟踪，提供的上下文很少。因此，自动分组（例如，由同一错误引起的一组崩溃）、诊断（例如，这是并发错误、缓冲区溢出等）和对错误进行优先级排序（例如，错误是否可能被利用）是不切实际的。******为了解决这个问题，我们一直在构建一个工具链，允许开发人员记录和重播生产应用程序，称为Castor。Castor有几个目标。首先，我们试图提供一个性能和空间开销足够低的应用程序记录/重放平台，以便在生产环境中保留默认状态，并在出现错误时捕获它们。在之前的工作中，我们已经证明，即使是最苛刻的多核科学和服务器工作负载，也可以用几个百分点的CPU开销来记录。展望未来，我们希望展示新技术，以适度的空间开销实现这一目标，并探索能够支持的bug分类和诊断的新方法。******本研究计划的主要目标是改进开发人员工具，这样就不会有未诊断的崩溃。我们希望继续构建我们的记录/重放工作，在可用性、性能和空间效率方面改进其核心功能，并将其与动态分析、程序切片和其他技术结合使用，以开发更好的工具来自动分组、诊断和优先处理错误。******第二个目标是探索记录/重播的其他用途。首先，我们将学习生成周期精确回放的技术，足以用于任何性能分析工具。其次，我们希望研究如何帮助开发人员自动创建容错流程，以支持容忍非故障停止错误。与此相关的是，我们可以扩展这些思想，使容错软件在很少甚至没有开销的情况下健壮地应对攻击。******这个研究计划将有助于我更广泛的研究目标，即在一个越来越依赖计算机的世界中提高系统可靠性。我们将有机会对软件开发和维护的方式产生影响。它还将为HQP在加拿大高需求领域提供丰富的培训场地。