Who’s debugging the debuggers? exposing debug information bugs in optimized binaries
Giuseppe Antonio Di Luna, Davide Italiano, Luca Massarelli, Sebastian Österlund, Cristiano Giuffrida, Leonardo Querzoni
Abstract
Despite the advancements in software testing, bugs still plague deployed software and result in crashes in production. When debugging issues —sometimes caused by “heisenbugs”— there is the need to interpret core dumps and reproduce the issue offline on the same binary deployed. This requires the entire toolchain (compiler, linker, debugger) to correctly generate and use debug information. Little attention has been devoted to checking that such information is correctly preserved by modern toolchains’ optimization stages. This is particularly important as managing debug information in optimized production binaries is non-trivial, often leading to toolchain bugs that may hinder post-deployment debugging efforts.