MKtrace: An Innovative Debugging Tool for Multi-Threaded Programs on Multiprocessor Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an innovative debugging tool called MKtrace to help programmers identify bugs in multi-threaded programs on multiprocessor systems with little overhead. Unlike the traditional debugging tools, we use the trace log to analyze the cause of a crash or any abnormal behaviour. Bugs can be identified within the log file, not directly at run time. Also, a key advantage of MKtrace is its insignificant overhead. The main idea of MKtrace is to monitor all the processes or threads from a program when they switch out in the kernel. We log the call stack of each thread, and then we analyze the log in the user space. We implemented MKtrace on Linux AS3 with two processors and achieved promising results during our experiments.