Ben Liblit and Alex Aiken

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-02-1203

, 2002

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2002/CSD-02-1203.pdf

After a program has crashed, it can be difficult to reconstruct why the failure occurred, or what actions led to the error. We propose a family of analysis techniques that use the evidence left behind by a failed program to build a time line of its possible actions from launch through termination. Our design can operate with zero run time instrumentation, or can flexibly incorporate a wide variety of artifacts such as stack traces and event logs for increased precision. Efficient demand-driven algorithms are provided, and the approach is well suited for incorporation into interactive debugging support tools.

---

BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Liblit:CSD-02-1203,
    Author= {Liblit, Ben and Aiken, Alex},
    Title= {Building a Better Backtrace: Techniques for Postmortem Program Analysis},
    Year= {2002},
    Month= {Oct},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2002/5763.html},
    Number= {UCB/CSD-02-1203},
    Abstract= {After a program has crashed, it can be difficult to reconstruct why the failure occurred, or what actions led to the error. We propose a family of analysis techniques that use the evidence left behind by a failed program to build a time line of its possible actions from launch through termination. Our design can operate with zero run time instrumentation, or can flexibly incorporate a wide variety of artifacts such as stack traces and event logs for increased precision. Efficient demand-driven algorithms are provided, and the approach is well suited for incorporation into interactive debugging support tools.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Liblit, Ben 
%A Aiken, Alex 
%T Building a Better Backtrace: Techniques for Postmortem Program Analysis
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2002
%@ UCB/CSD-02-1203
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2002/5763.html
%F Liblit:CSD-02-1203