Systems Debugging

Catalog description

Debugging is a practical and essential skill for any computer scientist to be able to properly diagnosis and fix problems (i.e., bugs) in systems and/or code. The goal of this course is for students to develop debugging skills through extensive practice. The course will cover general methodologies for debugging such as instrumentation, consistency checking, and divide & conquer. The course will also cover how to effectively utilize a variety of debugging tools such as debuggers, memory error detectors, race condition detectors, etc. Lastly, the course will explain specific types of bugs such as race conditions, deadlocks, and corrupted memory, which is necessary for finding these types of bugs. This is a project-based course that will involve extensive reading and writing of C code and use of Linux, so a solid background knowledge in C and Linux is expected.