Inbyggda system finns i nästan alla enheter som används i vårt dagliga liv, som exempelvis mobiltelefoner, kylskåp och bilar. En del enheter kan vara betydligt känsligare än andra, vilket innebär att en bugg som existerar i ett system kan orsaka skada, till och med förlust av människoliv, eller orsakar ingen skada alls. Mjukvarutestning och mjukvarufelsökning genomförs för att reducera buggar i ett system.Utbildningsprogrammet Datateknik och Mobil IT på Malmö universitet fokuserar inte på att undervisa mjukvarufelsökning med hjälp av felsökningsverktyg. Således presenterar denna forskning en felsökningslaboration skapat för studenter som går Datateknik och Mobil IT, som anses hjälpa studenterna att få kunskap i hur man använder felsökningsverktyget SAM4E Xplained Pro för att lokalisera buggar. Som ett resultat, utfördes felsökningslaborationen av fyra studenter varav 75 procent av buggarna hittades och åtgärdades. / Embedded systems are found in almost every device used in our daily lives, including cell phones, refrigerators, and cars. Some devices may be significantly more sensitive than others, meaning a bug appearing in a system could cause harm, even loss of human lives or cause no harm at all. To reduce bugs in a system, software testing and software debugging are performed.The Computer Science program at Malmö University does not focus on teaching software debugging using a debugger. Thus, this thesis presents a debugging lab created for Computer Science students, considered to help them gain knowledge in how to use the debugger SAM4E Xplained Pro to locate bugs. As a result, four students performed the debugging lab of which 75 percent of the bugs were found and remedied.

A significant part of the software development effort is spent on detecting deviations between software implementations and specifications, and subsequently locating the sources of such errors. This thesis illustrates that is possible to identify a significant number of errors during static analysis of declarative object-oriented equation-based modeling languages that are typically used for system modeling and simulation. Detecting anomalies in the source code without actually solving the underlying system of equations provides a significant advantage: a modeling error can be corrected before trying to get the model compiled or embarking on a computationally expensive symbolic or numerical solution process. The overall objective of this work is to demonstrate that debugging based on static analysis techniques can considerably improve the error location and error correcting process when modeling with equation-based languages. A new method is proposed for debugging of over- and under-constrained systems of equations. The improved approach described in this thesis is to perform the debugging process on the flattened intermediate form of the source code and to use filtering criteria generated from program annotations and from the translation rules. Each time when an error is detected in the intermediate code and the error fixing solution is elaborated, the debugger queries for the original source code before presenting any information to the user. In this way, the user is exposed to the original language source code and not burdened with additional information from the translation process or required to inspect the intermediate code. We present the design and implementation of debugging kernel prototypes, tightly integrated with the core of the optimizer module of a Modelica compiler, including details of the novel framework required for automatic debugging of equation-based languages. This thesis establishes that structural static analysis performed on the underlying system of equations from object-oriented mathematical models can effectively be used to statically debug real Modelica programs. Most of our conclusions developed in this thesis are also valid for other equation-based modeling languages. / <p>Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2002:37.</p>

Depurar sistemas distribuídos continua uma tarefa difícil, mesmo após 30 anos de pesquisa intensa. Embora essa situação possa ser parcialmente atribuída à complexidade das execuções concorrentes, o rápido passo de desenvolvimento das plataformas e tecnologias para computação distribuída também carrega a sua parcela de culpa, por encurtar a vida de muitas ferramentas potencialmente úteis. Neste trabalho, apresentamos uma análise dos principais problemas, técnicas e ferramentas ligados à depuração de sistemas concorrentes e discutidos na literatura. Baseados nessa análise, desenvolvemos e apresentamos uma nova técnica, simples e portátil, que pode ser aplicada a sistemas distribuídos que utilizam chamadas síncronas e bloqueantes. Essa técnica, concebida para sobreviver à heterogeneidade, é validada por meio da implementação de um arcabouço escrito para plataforma Eclipse e instanciado para sistemas de objetos distribuídos baseados em Java/CORBA. / After over thirty years of intense research, debugging distributed systems is still regarded as a difficult task. While this situation could be partially blamed on the fact that concurrent executions are complex, the fast pace of evolution witnessed with distributed computing technologies have also played its by shortening the lifespan of many potentially useful debugging tools. This work presents an analysis of the main issues, techniques and tools in the field of parallel, distributed, and concurrent debugging in general. Based on this analysis, we develop and present a simple and portable technique targeted at synchronous-call-based distributed systems. This technique, designed for portability, is validated through the implementation of an Eclipse-based framework that is instantiated for Java/CORBA distributed object systems.

Depurar sistemas distribuídos continua uma tarefa difícil, mesmo após 30 anos de pesquisa intensa. Embora essa situação possa ser parcialmente atribuída à complexidade das execuções concorrentes, o rápido passo de desenvolvimento das plataformas e tecnologias para computação distribuída também carrega a sua parcela de culpa, por encurtar a vida de muitas ferramentas potencialmente úteis. Neste trabalho, apresentamos uma análise dos principais problemas, técnicas e ferramentas ligados à depuração de sistemas concorrentes e discutidos na literatura. Baseados nessa análise, desenvolvemos e apresentamos uma nova técnica, simples e portátil, que pode ser aplicada a sistemas distribuídos que utilizam chamadas síncronas e bloqueantes. Essa técnica, concebida para sobreviver à heterogeneidade, é validada por meio da implementação de um arcabouço escrito para plataforma Eclipse e instanciado para sistemas de objetos distribuídos baseados em Java/CORBA. / After over thirty years of intense research, debugging distributed systems is still regarded as a difficult task. While this situation could be partially blamed on the fact that concurrent executions are complex, the fast pace of evolution witnessed with distributed computing technologies have also played its by shortening the lifespan of many potentially useful debugging tools. This work presents an analysis of the main issues, techniques and tools in the field of parallel, distributed, and concurrent debugging in general. Based on this analysis, we develop and present a simple and portable technique targeted at synchronous-call-based distributed systems. This technique, designed for portability, is validated through the implementation of an Eclipse-based framework that is instantiated for Java/CORBA distributed object systems.

The problems of software debugging and system reliability/availability are among the most challenging problems the computing industry is facing today, with direct impact on the development and operating costs of computing systems. A promising debugging technique that assists programmers identify and fix the causes of software bugs a lot more efficiently is bidirectional debugging, which enables the user to execute the program in "reverse", and a typical method used to recover a system after a fault is backwards error recovery, which restores the system to the last error-free state. Both reverse execution and backwards error recovery are enabled by creating memory checkpoints, which are used to restore the program/system to a prior point in time and re-execute until the point of interest. The checkpointing frequency is the primary factor that affects both the latency of reverse execution and the recovery time of the system; more frequent checkpoints reduce the necessary re-execution time. Frequent creation of checkpoints poses performance challenges, because of the increased number of memory reads and writes necessary for copying the modified system/program memory, and also because of software interventions, additional synchronization and I/O, etc., needed for creating a checkpoint. In this thesis I examine a number of different hardware accelerators, whose role is to create frequent memory checkpoints in the background, at minimal performance overheads. For the purpose of reverse execution, I propose the HARE and Euripus hardware checkpoint accelerators. HARE and Euripus create different types of checkpoints, and employ different methods for keeping track of the modified memory. As a result, HARE and Euripus have different hardware costs and provide different functionality which directly affects the latency of reverse execution. For improving the availability of the system, I propose the Kyma hardware accelerator. Kyma enables simultaneous creation of checkpoints at different frequencies, which allows the system to recover from multiple types of errors and tolerate variable error-detection latencies. The Kyma and Euripus hardware engines have similar architectures, but the functionality of the Kyma engine is optimized for further reducing the performance overheads and improving the reliability of the system. The functionality of the Kyma and Euripus engines can be combined into a unified accelerator that can serve the needs of both bidirectional debugging and system recovery.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / abstract / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Short time-to-bug localization is extremely important for any 24x7 service-oriented application. To this end, we introduce a new debugging paradigm called live debugging. There are two goals that any live debugging infrastructure must meet: Firstly, it must offer real-time insight for bug diagnosis and localization, which is paramount when errors happen in user-facing applications. Secondly, live debugging should not impact user-facing performance for normal events. In large distributed applications, bugs which impact only a small percentage of users are common. In such scenarios, debugging a small part of the application should not impact the entire system. With the above-stated goals in mind, this thesis presents a framework called Parikshan, which leverages user-space containers (OpenVZ) to launch application instances for the express purpose of live debugging. Parikshan is driven by a live-cloning process, which generates a replica (called debug container) of production services, cloned from a production container which continues to provide the real output to the user. The debug container provides a sandbox environment, for safe execution of monitoring/debugging done by the users without any perturbation to the execution environment. As a part of this framework, we have designed customized-network proxies, which replicate inputs from clients to both the production and test-container, as well safely discard all outputs. Together the network duplicator, and the debug container ensure both compute and network isolation of the debugging environment. We believe that this piece of work provides the first of its kind practical real-time debugging of large multi-tier and cloud applications, without requiring any application downtime, and minimal performance impact.

Debugging multi-agent systems, which are concurrent, distributed, and consist of complex components is difficult, yet crucial. The development of these complex systems is supported by agent-oriented software engineering methodologies which utilise agents as the central design metaphor. The systems that are developed are inherently complex since the components of these systems may interact in flexible and sophisticated ways and traditional debugging techniques are not appropriate. Despite this, very little effort has been applied to developing appropriate debugging tools and techniques. Debugging multi-agent systems without good debugging tools is highly impractical and without suitable debugging support developing and maintaining multi-agent systems will be more difficult than it need be. In this thesis we propose that the debugging process can be supported by following an agent-oriented design methodology, and then using the developed design artifacts in the debugging phase. We propose a domain independent debugging framework which comprises the developed processes and components that are necessary in using design artifacts as debugging artifacts. Our approach is to take a non-formal design artifact, such as an AUML protocol design, and encode it in a machine interpretable manner such that the design can be used as a model of correct system behaviour. These models are used by a run-time debugging system to compare observed behaviour against specified behaviour. We provide details for transforming two design artifact types into equivalent debugging artifacts and show how these can be used to detect bugs. During a debugging episode in which a bug has been identified our debugging approach can provide detailed information about the possible reason for the bug occurring. To determine if this information was useful in helping to debug programs we undertook a thorough empirical study and identified that use of the debugging tool translated to an improvement in debugging performance. We conclude that the debugging techniques developed in this thesis provide effective debugging support for multi-agent systems and by having an extensible framework new design artifacts can be explored and as translations are developed they can be added to the debugging system.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-37). Also available on the World Wide Web.