rr-debugger / rr-debugger/rr

Use hardware breakpoints and bpf for fast fast-forwarding to asynchronous events

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C++
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Description

emulate_async_signal can be slow if the asynchronous signal to be delivered happens in a tight loop. (See #3650 for an example).

Instead of using a software breakpoint and evaluating conditions from the rr supervisor, we could use a hardware breakpoint, attach a bpf program that performs a subset of the necessary condition evaluation to rapidly reject as many iterations of the breakpoint as possible (e.g. by comparing the general purpose registers, which are available to bpf programs attached to perf events), and perform final validation from the rr supervisor. In testing this reduces the overhead on a pathological trace provided by a customer by 94%.

Kernel patches are up at https://lkml.org/lkml/2023/12/4/1384

The rr side stuff is a pile of hacks for now but I'll clean it up once the kernel patches are accepted.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with issue #3650 to understand the pathological asynchronous-event trace, then read the linked kernel patches and the existing rr-side implementation of emulate_async_signal. Done means replacing the slow software-breakpoint path with the proposed hardware-breakpoint and BPF-assisted fast rejection while retaining final validation in the rr supervisor.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp, linux
Domain
devtools, operating-systems, performance, reverse-engineering
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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