More efficient automatic repair of large-scale programs using weak recompilation

Abstract

Automatically repairing a bug can be a time-consuming process especially for large-scale programs owing to the significant amount of time spent recompiling and reinstalling the patched program. To reduce this time overhead and speed up the repair process, in this paper we present a recompilation technique called weak recompilation. In weak recompilation, we assume that a program consists of a set of components, and for each candidate patch only the altered components are recompiled to a shared library. The original program is then dynamically updated by a function indirection mechanism. The advantage of weak recompilation is that redundant recompilation cost can be avoided, and while the reinstallation cost is completely eliminated as the original executable program is not modified at all. For maximum applicability of weak recompilation we created WAutoRepair, a scalable system for fixing bugs with high efficiency in large-scale C programs. The experiments on real bugs in widely used programs show that our repair system significantly outperforms Genprog, a well-known approach to automatic program repair. For the wireshark program containing over 2 million lines of code, WAutoRepair is over 128 times faster in terms of recompilation cost than Genprog.