Operating System Support for Replay of Concurrent 
Non-Deterministic Shared Memory Applications


Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell
Department of Computer Science
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
{mer,cogswell}@cs.uoregon.edu

Abstract:

Replay of shared memory program execution is desirable in many domains 
including cyclic debugging, fault tolerance and performance monitoring. 
Past approaches to repeatable execution have focused on the problem of 
re-executing the shared memory access patterns in parallel programs. 
With the proliferation of operating system supported threads and shared 
memory for uniprocessor programs, there is a clear need for efficient replay 
of concurrent applications. The solutions for parallel systems can be 
performance prohibitive when applied to the uniprocessor case. We briefly 
present an algorithm, called the repeatable scheduling algorithm, combining 
scheduling and instruction counts to provide an invariant for efficient, 
language independent replay of concurrent shared memory applications. 
We focus on the design of a general operating system exported framework that 
makes possible the use of hardware instruction counters and scheduling 
notifications for efficient implementation of repeatable scheduling.