FiLM: A Runtime Monitoring Tool for Distributed Systems

Author

Zhang, Fuyuan ; Qi, Zhengwei ; Guan, Haibing ; Liu, Xuezheng ; Yang, Mao ; Zhang, Zheng

Author_Institution

Sch. of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ., Shanghai, China

fYear

2009

fDate

8-10 July 2009

Firstpage

40

Lastpage

46

Abstract

It is well recognized that debugging or testing a distributed system is a great challenge. FiLM is a runtime monitoring tool that can monitor the execution of distributed applications against LTL specifications on finite traces. Implemented within the online predicate checking infrastructure D³S, FiLM models the execution of distributed applications as a trace of consistent global snapshots with global timestamps, and it employs finite automata constructed from LTL specifications to evaluate the trace of distributed systems. We proved that the generated automata accept exactly the traces which satisfy LTL specifications. Our case study shows that FiLM successfully detected an important and intricate liveness bug in a real Paxos implementation.

Keywords

finite automata; formal specification; program debugging; software tools; FiLM runtime monitoring tool; LTL specification; Paxos implementation; debugging method; distributed application; finite automata; global snapshot; online predicate checking infrastructure D³S; Asia; Automata; Computer bugs; Distributed computing; Information analysis; Monitoring; Protocols; Runtime; Software debugging; Software tools; LTL; distributed systems; finite automata; runtime monitoring;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Secure Software Integration and Reliability Improvement, 2009. SSIRI 2009. Third IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Shanghai

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-3758-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SSIRI.2009.55

Filename

5325394