Edit: of course, I should have mentioned that doesn't apply to PANDA — by recording events at a non-system-call interface, PANDA avoids the problems of system-call emulation and instead has the problems of hardware emulation. I imagine PANDA will be a heck of a lot more useful for debugging new bare-metal operating systems. The publisher regrets the error.
Time-travel debugging and deterministic replay is such a fundamentally important feature, and it can expand our capabilities in many different ways that we're only starting to explore. Debugging is just one possible application; consider also exhaustive testing of error conditions, re-execution of optimistic transactions that hit a write conflict, temporal backtracking search over executions, data prevalence (though it doesn't solve the schema upgrade problem), and deterministic building. And remember that the hardest problem for reverse-mode automatic differentiation is figuring out how to "run the program backwards" in order to find the gradient of the output; deterministic replay strategies are directly applicable to this problem and therefore to generalized gradient descent.
It's a shame that mec-replay fell by the wayside 20 years ago. Surely we won't let that happen this time. http://www.boutell.com/lsm/lsmbyid.cgi/001191 https://static.lwn.net/1999/0121/a/mec.html
Much to my surprise, you can still download mec-replay 0.3 from 1995, although you'd probably need to build a Linux 1.3 kernel to run it with: ftp://ftp.shout.net/pub/users/mec/misc/mec-0.3.tar.gz
Unfortunately we haven't implemented the gdb reverse debugging commands yet, so it's not as useful for debugging as it could be. Hopefully soon.
Just like searching google for go is pointless; instead one should search for golang
