Just like every other piece of software, the FreeBSD kernel has bugs. Debugging a kernel is a bit different from debugging a userland program as there is nothing underneath the kernel to provide debugging facilities such as ptrace() or procfs. This paper will give a brief overview of some of the tools available for investigating bugs in the FreeBSD kernel. It will cover the in-kernel debugger D...

Semantic analysis (of programs, systems, etc.) should become a mature discipline to be included in educational curricula in computer science; This requires the discipline to evolve from an ill-assorted collection of methods and algorithms to a large scope formal reasoning and design methodology; In particular, program analysis methods should be explained in language, program encoding, semantics...

This paper presents a formal model of tracing for functional programs based on a small-step operational semantics. The model records the computation of a functional program in a graph which can be utilised for various purposes such as algorithmic debugging. The main contribution of this paper is to prove the correctness of algorithmic debugging for functional programs based on the model. Althou...

This paper proposes analysis models for representing processes of debugging unfamiliar programs focusing on how engineers comprehend each software module and locate a bug. Since actual debugging strategies relate to engineers’ impressions of each software module – either the module is faulty, not faulty or uncertain, proposed models consider both mentaland externalactivities of engineers. We ap...

Debugging actions durin.g the test/debug phase of software d e ve1op.m e nt are la ot always performed perfectly. That is, not all th.e software faults detected are perfectly removed without introducing new faults. This phenomenon is called the imperfect debugging. The HyperGeo ni et ric Dist 1-i but i on software relia bilat y growth Model (HGDM) was developed for estimating the number of soft...

This paper describes a parallel debugging environment that applies visualizations in a top-down, struc-tured approach for debugging. This environment, referred to as GOLD, uses visualizations in the traditional way for examining a program state, but it also extends the use of visualizations in two directions. First, a technique is described for using visualizations to guide the operation of set...

In non-strict functional programming languages such as Haskell, it happens often that some parts of a program are not evaluated because their values are not demanded. In practice, those unevaluated parts are often replaced by a placeholder (e.g. _) in order to keep the trace size smaller. In the process of algorithmic debugging, one needs to answer several questions in order to locate a program...

A dynamic program slice is an executable subset of the original program that produces the same computations on a subset of selected variables and inputs. It differs from the static slice (Weiser, 1982, 1984) in that it is entirely defined on the basis of a computation. The two main advantages are the following: Arrays and dynamic data structures can be handled more precisely and the size of sli...

This paper discusses the benefits of a temporal data model for debugging and run-time visualization of object-oriented software. Current debugging models generally only provide access to the current program state and support manual exploration of the state to uncover the cause of program errors. However, often the cause of an error lies in distant previous states, and a more comprehensive view ...