Re: vmware's replay framework and gdb

Michael Snyder
2008-11-06T01:21:25Z

Edward Peschko wrote:
> hey..
>
> I watched the following Google tech talk with much interest:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvMlihjqlhY
>
> It describes a very generic, scalable, environment-agnostic way of
> recording programs' execution via vmware's virtualization, and doing
> reverse tracing (which is one of the reasons I'd like to record
> programs in the first place). I heard gdb mentioned in the video in
> passing, so I'm assuming someone in the list is familiar with vmware's
> effort,

Me -- I'm a member of the replay debugging team at VMware,
and a public gdb maintainer, and I was at that tech talk.

> but how far along is gdb in supporting this framework?

I'm working on it. ;-)

If you look at the recent threads on this list about reverse
debugging in gdb, you'll get an idea of where we're headed.
We want to let a user debug a recorded execution, deterministic-
ally, and make it run both forward and backward using the same
reverse debugging commands as described in those threads
(reverse-continue, reverse-step, reverse-next etc.)

We don't have any product release date for it, but you can
already do some rudimentary replay debugging with the
released version of VMware Worksatation and the standard gdb.
Here's a blog article about it: