Flashback: a lightweight extension for rollback and deterministic replay for software debugging

Software robustness has significant impact on system availability. Unfortunately, finding software bugs is a very challenging task because many bugs are hard to reproduce. While debugging a program, it would be very useful to rollback a crashed program to a previous execution point and deterministically re-execute the "buggy" code region. However, most previous work on rollback and replay support was designed to survive hardware or operating system failures, and is therefore too heavyweight for the fine-grained rollback and replay needed for software debugging. This paper presents Flashback...