Making your crashes work for you (doctoral symposium)

Debugging is difficult and costly. Developers greatly value full traces and complete, reproducible crash recordings, but these are impractical for deployed software. Fortunately, failing applications can leave behind a snapshot of their crashing state in the form of a core dump. Unfortunately, crash data alone often leaves substantial ambiguity in the program's execution. My thesis work aims both to improve the quality of information extracted from core dumps and enhance this readily-available information. My prior work showed that automated postmortem analysis results can be significantly improved by targeted, lightweight, and tunable instrumentation (0-5% run-time overhead). My thesis aims to expand this work in three directions: improved tracing and dump data recovery, expanded postmortem analyses, and improved tracing efficiency based on previously-observed failures.