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Fast breakpoints: design and implementation

Author:

Peter B. KesslerAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '90: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1990 conference on Programming language design and implementation

Pages 78 - 84

https://doi.org/10.1145/93542.93555

Published: 01 June 1990 Publication History

Abstract

We have designed and implemented a fast breakpoint facility. Breakpoints are usually thought of as a feature of an interactive debugger, in which case the breakpoints need not be particularly fast. In our environment breakpoints are often used for non-interactive information gathering; for example, procedure call count and statement execution count profiling [Swinehart, et al.]. When used non-interactively, breakpoints should be as fast as possible, so as to perturb the execution of the program as little as possible. Even in interactive debuggers, a conditional breakpoint facility would benefit from breakpoints that could transfer to the evaluation of the condition rapidly, and continue expeditiously if the condition were not satisfied. Such conditional breakpoints could be used to check assertions, etc. Program advising could also make use of fast breakpoints [Teitelman]. Examples of advising include tracing, timing, and even animation, all of which should be part of an advanced programming environment.

We have ported the Cedar environment from a machine with microcode support for breakpoints [Lampson and Pier] to commercial platforms running C code [Atkinson, et al.]. Most of our ports run under the Unix^* operating system, so one choice for implementing breakpoints for Cedar was to use the breakpoint facility provided by that system. The breakpoints provided by the Unix operating system are several orders of magnitude too slow (and also several process switches too complicated) for the applications we have in mind. So we designed a breakpoint system that was fast enough for our purposes.

Breakpoints for uni-processors running single threads of control used to be fast and simple to implement. This paper shows that breakpoints can still be fast, even with multiple threads of control on multi-processors. This paper describes problems in the design of a breakpoint package for modern computer architectures and programming styles, and our solutions to them for a particular architecture.

References

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R. Atkinson, A. Demers, C. Hauser, C. Jacobi, P. Kessler, M. Weiser, "Experiences Creating a Portable Cedar", in Proceedings of the SIGPLAN'89 Conference on Programming Design and Implementation, S IGPLAN Notices Vol. 24, No. 7, July 1989.

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Cited By

Kell SStinnett JEdwards JTaeumel M(2024)Source-Level Debugging of Compiler-Optimised Code: Ill-Posed, but Not ImpossibleProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3689492.3690047(38-53)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690047
Stinnett JKell SRodríguez GSadayappan PSukumaran-Rajam A(2024)Accurate Coverage Metrics for Compiler-Generated Debugging InformationProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction10.1145/3640537.3641578(126-136)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3640537.3641578
Casias MAngstadt KTracy II TSkadron KWeimer WBahar IHerlihy MWitchel ELebeck A(2019)Debugging Support for Pattern-Matching Languages and AcceleratorsProceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3297858.3304066(1073-1086)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3297858.3304066
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Index Terms

Fast breakpoints: design and implementation
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Procedures, functions and subroutines
      2. Language types

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '90: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1990 conference on Programming language design and implementation

June 1990

351 pages

ISBN:0897913647

DOI:10.1145/93542

Chairman:
Bernard N. Fischer

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 25, Issue 6
Jun. 1990
343 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/93548
Editor:
Marina Chen
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1990 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 June 1990

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Cited By

Kell SStinnett JEdwards JTaeumel M(2024)Source-Level Debugging of Compiler-Optimised Code: Ill-Posed, but Not ImpossibleProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3689492.3690047(38-53)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690047
Stinnett JKell SRodríguez GSadayappan PSukumaran-Rajam A(2024)Accurate Coverage Metrics for Compiler-Generated Debugging InformationProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction10.1145/3640537.3641578(126-136)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3640537.3641578
Casias MAngstadt KTracy II TSkadron KWeimer WBahar IHerlihy MWitchel ELebeck A(2019)Debugging Support for Pattern-Matching Languages and AcceleratorsProceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3297858.3304066(1073-1086)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3297858.3304066
Kell S(2019)Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking SmalltalkReflections on Programming Systems10.1007/978-3-319-97226-8_6(189-213)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97226-8_6
Kell SHarris TMadhavapeddy A(2013)The operating systemProceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/2525528.2525534(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2525528.2525534
Häubl CWimmer CMössenböck HPlümicke MBinder W(2013)Deriving code coverage information from profiling data recorded for a trace-based just-in-time compilerProceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools10.1145/2500828.2500829(1-12)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2500828.2500829
Vasudevan A(2012)Effective Malware Analysis Using Stealth BreakpointsThreats, Countermeasures, and Advances in Applied Information Security10.4018/978-1-4666-0978-5.ch023(444-461)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-0978-5.ch023
Misurda JChilders BSoffa MProbst CWimmer C(2011)Jazz2Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java10.1145/2093157.2093169(81-90)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2093157.2093169
Vasudevan A(2009)Re-inforced stealth breakpoints2009 Fourth International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems (CRiSIS 2009)10.1109/CRISIS.2009.5411978(59-66)Online publication date: Oct-2009
https://doi.org/10.1109/CRISIS.2009.5411978
Guha AHiser JKumar NYang JZhao MZhou SChilders BDavidson JHazelwood KSoffa M(2007)Virtual Execution Environments: Support and Tools2007 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium10.1109/IPDPS.2007.370489(1-6)Online publication date: Mar-2007
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2007.370489
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