Re: [discuss] Support for reverse-execution

Dan Shearer
2005-05-16T18:04:03Z

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 03:16:49AM +0930, Dan Shearer wrote:

> Personally I think reversibility is the biggest advance in debugging
> since source code debugging. We've got massive and complicated codebases
> we're working with today and we need better productivity. Projects like
> KDE, Samba and OpenOffice use valgrind+gdb. With reversibility
> productivity will improve even more, I can't make valgrind reversible
> but I can help with gdb. That's why I'm here in a personal capacity.
>
> When Reversibility Becomes Useful
> ---------------------------------
>
> From what I've learned with Simics, reversibility becomes a generally
> useful technique when both the simulator and the problem have certain
> characteristics.

... going on to describe something that valgrind is unlikely ever to
become :-)

What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that I have learned from a very
general solution how debugging is helped by reversibility. I'm sure some
of this knowledge scales down to the vertical solutions, however as per
the example of Cygnus' SID simulator if you start looking at a
micro-level view it is possible to come to the conclusion "so why
bother?"

--
Dan Shearer
dan@shearer.org