Replay Debugging of Real-Time Vxworks Applications

Debugging multi-task real-time VxWorks applications is tedious and time-consuming for developers. The non-determinism within the application execution makes the developers hard to reproduce a failure.1As a result, the developers cannot perform cyclic debugging easily on these real-time applications. Replay debugging techniques can help developers to replay the failure scenario with determinism. In this paper, we propose an approach to replaying real-time VxWorks applications. We make use of dynamic binary instrumentation to record data flow non-determinism. Furthermore, we instrument the VxWorks kernel to record control flow non-determinism. Finally, the recorded information together with a modified VxWorks kernel is used by our replayer to support effective replaying. Our evaluation results show that our approach can effectively replay real-time multi-task VxWorks applications with low overhead.