Practical Record And Replay Debugging With rr

Hi all. I'm pleased to announce the first Auckland C++ Meetup for 2017.

This time we have a presentation from Robert O'Callahan about rr.

Practical Record And Replay Debugging With rr - Robert O'Callahan

Debugging is expensive and not fun, especially debugging intermittent failures. rr (http://rr-project.org (http://rr-project.org/)) lets you record Linux user-space process runs until you see a failure and replay the failing run perfectly. For C and C++ programs you can debug the replay with gdb --- with efficient "reverse execution", which (along with data watchpoints) makes debugging fast and fun. Mozilla developers use rr daily to debug Firefox. In this talk I will describe how rr leverages modern OS and hardware features to achieve lower recording overhead (often less than 1.5x) than its competitors, while running on stock Intel hardware and requiring no kernel changes. We'll talk about rr's limitations and how they might be overcome. Its biggest limitations are the workflow and user interface of existing debuggers, which are not fit for purpose; I'll explain why, and what we should do about it.

Robert O'Callahan was a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla and started Mozilla's Auckland office. He is the lead developer of rr and co-founder of Pernosco, a startup working on the next generation of debugging tools.

Rough agenda:

18:00 Arrive, grab a drink, etc.

18:15 Presentation

19:15 Pizza, discussion, etc.