Using Multi-Core to Debug Interactive Applications

Instrumentation technology has been widely used in debugging interactive applications, such as interactive games and virtual reality. Debug codes are instrumented into a target program in order to collect run-time information. Although instrumentation provides detail information of the target program behavior, it can significantly prolong execution time, change program behavior and lead to incorrect debugging results, especially for time dependent and real-time applications. This paper aims to design a scalable parallel debugging mechanism to reduce instrumentation overhead while collecting detail run-time information. We design a new synchronization mechanism of instrumentation, named MDM, which uses multiple buffers to process debug messages. Also, a binding mechanism is used to specify the relationship between the target program, helper threads and cores. We conduct a case study of augmented reality interactive games on an Intel Core i7-2600 processor with Linux 2.6.38. Compared to existing methods, MDM can reduce instrumentation overhead by up to 19%.