Interacting with dead objects

Abstract

Debugging and analyzing a snapshot of a crashed program's memory is far more difficult than working with a live program, because debuggers can no longer execute code to help make sense of the program state. We present an architecture that supports the restricted execution of ordinary code starting from the snapshot, as if the dead objects within it had been restored, but without access to their original external environment. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach via an implementation for Java that does not require a custom virtual machine, show that it performs competitively with live execution, and use it to diagnose an unresolved memory leak in a mature mainstream application.

Essential retroactive weaving

“…This aligns closely with how production implementations are likely to be implemented, as it allows the underlying trace and its store to proceed independently of the retroactive state [8].…”

“…: Grammar for terms in the base version of RAPL as if they were present in a past execution, and described an implementation for an aspect-oriented extension of C. We have also presented evidence for the utility of retroactive execution for various post-hoc analyses via an implementation for the Java Virtual Machine [8]. We have since extended this implementation to create a retroactive weaver for AspectJ.…”

Making your crashes work for you (doctoral symposium)

“…Salkeld and Kiczales [27] resurrect Java objects from a shadow heap dump. I similarly propose to resurrect dead features of execution, but go beyond objects in live memory at the time of the crash.…”