Cross-ISA debugging in meta-circular VMs

Kotselidis, Christos; Nisbet, Andy; Zakkak, Foivos S.; Foutris, Nikos

doi:10.1145/3141871.3141872

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Recently, the team of Maxine reported a QEMU test-based infrastructure for cross-ISA testing and debugging [13]. They reported that this infrastructure helped them in porting their VM to AArch32 (ARMv7), similarly that what ours helped us in porting to AArch64.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…For example, it has been reported that debugging memory corruption bugs in a simulation could take several hours of execution 1 . Recently, the team of Maxine recently reported a test-based infrastructure for cross-ISA debugging [13]. They report that still debugging happens in gdb in a different abstraction level than the original source code and that they are not able to cover many parts of their codebase.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cross-ISA testing of the Pharo VM: lessons learned while porting to ARMv8

Polito

Tesone

Ducasse

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

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Testing and debugging a Virtual Machine is a laborious task without the proper tooling. This is particularly true for VMs with JIT compilation and dynamic code patching for techniques such as inline caching. In addition, this situation is getting worse when the VM builds and runs on multiple target architectures.In this paper, we report on several lessons we learned while testing the Pharo VM, particularly during the port of its Cogit JIT compiler to the AArch64 architecture. The Pharo VM presented already a simulation environment that is very handy to simulate full executions and live-develop the VM. However, this full simulation environment makes it difficult to reproduce short and simple testing scenarios. We extended the pre-existing simulation environment with a testing infrastructure and a methodology that allow us to have fine-grained control of testing scenarios, making tests small, fast, reproducible, and cross-ISA.We report on how this testing infrastructure allowed us to cope with two different development scenarios: (1) porting the Cogit JIT compiler to AArch64 without early access to real hardware and (2) debugging memory corruptions due to GC bugs.CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Runtime environments.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-ISA testing of the Pharo VM: lessons learned while porting to ARMv8

Polito

Tesone

Ducasse

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

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“…VM Testing. Maxine and Pharo reported recently QEMU based unit testing infrastructures for cross-ISA testing and debugging [15,25]. They reported that this infrastructures helped them in porting their VMs to ARMv7 and ARMv8 64bits respectively.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, it has been reported that debugging memory corruption bugs in a simulation could take several hours of execution 1 . Recently, the team of Maxine reported a test-based infrastructure for cross-ISA debugging [15]. They reported that most debugging happens in gdb when bootstrapping a new architecture, in a different abstraction level than the original source code, and that they were not able to cover many parts of their codebase.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreter-guided differential JIT compiler unit testing

Polito

Tesone

Ducasse

2022

Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

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Modern language implementations using Virtual Machines feature diverse execution engines such as byte-code interpreters and machine-code dynamic translators, a.k.a. JIT compilers. Validating such engines requires not only validating each in isolation, but also that they are functionally equivalent. Tests should be duplicated for each execution engine exercising the same execution paths on each of them.In this paper we present a novel automated testing approach for virtual machines featuring byte-code interpreters. Our solution uses concolic meta-interpretation: it applies concolic testing to a byte-code interpreter to explore all possible execution interpreter paths and obtain a list of concrete values that explore such paths. We then use such values to apply differential testing on the VM interpreter and JIT compiler. This solution is based on two insights: (1) both the interpreter and compiler implement the same language semantics and (2) interpreters are simple executable specifications of those semantics and thus promising targets to (meta-) interpretation using concolic testing. We validated it on 4 different compilers of the open-source Pharo Virtual Machine and found 468 differences between them, produced by 91 different causes, organized in 6 different categories.

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“…In order to support multiple ISAs, MaxineVM and its compilers are being ported to different architectures. Currently, Beehive executes on x86 and ARMv7 architectures while ongoing work extends the support for AArch64 and RISC-V via the CrossISA toolkit [14].…”

Section: The Beehive Ecosystemmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the future of research VMs: a hardware/software perspective

Zakkak

Nisbet

Mawer

et al. 2018

Conference Companion of the 2nd International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming

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In the recent years, we have witnessed an explosion of the usages of Virtual Machines (VMs) which are currently found in desktops, smartphones, and cloud deployments. These recent developments create new research opportunities in the VM domain extending from performance to energy efficiency, and scalability studies. Research into these directions necessitates research frameworks for VMs that provide full coverage of the execution domains and hardware platforms. Unfortunately, the state of the art on Research VMs does not live up to such expectations and lacks behind industrialstrength software, making it hard for the research community to provide valuable insights.This paper presents our work in attempting to tackle those shortcomings by introducing Beehive, our vision towards a modular and seamlessly extensible ecosystem for research on virtual machines. Beehive unifies a number of existing state-of-the-art tools and components with novel ones providing a complete platform for hardware/software co-design of Virtual Machines.

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Cross-ISA debugging in meta-circular VMs

Cited by 6 publications

References 11 publications

Cross-ISA testing of the Pharo VM: lessons learned while porting to ARMv8

Cross-ISA testing of the Pharo VM: lessons learned while porting to ARMv8

Interpreter-guided differential JIT compiler unit testing

On the future of research VMs: a hardware/software perspective

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