Rr

rr is the Record and Replay Framework, developped by Mozilla, and is a replacement for and powerful enhancement of gdb.

References

• rr homepage.
• Using rr in an IDE
• Building and Installing and rr Usage, from Mozilla wiki.

• Pernosco A nice front-end for rr (free for users on Github, see HN thread).

Install and configuration

On Debian, rr is available as a package:

sudo apt install rr

rr also requires the linux performance analysis package for the current kernel.

# Install linux perf
sudo apt install linux-perf-4.19

# Enable perf for user land (temporary)
sudo sysctl kernel.perf_event_paranoid=0

See rr usage page for more performance tuning and setting perf flag permanently.

Example of use

Start recording the application:

rr record my_app

Then replay it with:

rr replay

In case the application fires several processes, we can tell rr to fast-forward until child is forked. First we use rr ps to get the list of recorded processes, then we start rr with -f:

rr ps
rr replay -f 12345

During replay, rr behaves likes gdb, with the usual reverse debugging command. See referenced links for more information.

Troubleshoot

Potential issues in VM

• See this bug in VMWare [1]. Fix is to add monitor_control.disable_hvsim_clusters = true.
• See this bug in Xen [2].
• Discuss on rr in Hacker News.