“A relational debugging engine for the graphics pipeline” by Duca, Niski, Bilodeau, Bolitho, Chen, et al. …
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- A relational debugging engine for the graphics pipeline
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
We present a new, unified approach to debugging graphics software. We propose a representation of all graphics state over the course of program execution as a relational database, and produce a query-based framework for extracting, manipulating, and visualizing data from all stages of the graphics pipeline. Using an SQL-based query language, the programmer can establish functional relationships among all the data, linking OpenGL state to primitives to vertices to fragments to pixels. Based on the Chromium library, our approach requires no modification to or recompilation of the program to be debugged, and forms a superset of many existing techniques for debugging graphics software.
References:
1. Baxter. B., 2002. Imdebug. {online} http://www.billbaxter.com/projects/imdebug/.Google Scholar
2. Everitt, C., 2001. Interactive order-independent transparency. {online} http://developer.nvidia.com/object/Interactive_Order-Transparency.html.Google Scholar
3. Friedell, M., LaPolla, M., Kochhar, S., Sistare, S., and Juda. J. 1991. Visualizing the behavior of massively parallel programs. In Supercomputing ’91: Proceedings of the 1991 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, ACM Press, 472–480. Google ScholarDigital Library
4. Gould, D., 2005. GLSurveyor. {online} http://www.glsurveyor.com/.Google Scholar
5. Graphics Remedy, 2005. gDEBugger. {online} http://www.gremedy.com/.Google Scholar
6. Humphreys, G., Eldridge, M., Buck, I., Stoll, G., Everett. M., and Hanrahan, P. 2001. WireGL: a scalable graphics system for clusters. In Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, 129–140. Google ScholarDigital Library
7. Humphreys, G., Houston, M., Ng, R., Frank, R., Ahern, S., Kirchner, P., and Klosowski, J. 2002. Chromium: A stream processing framework for interactive rendering on clusters. In SIGGRAPH. 693–702. Google ScholarDigital Library
8. Igehy, H., Stoll, G., and Hanrahan, P. 1998. The design of a parallel graphics interface. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1998, 141–150. Google ScholarDigital Library
9. Kaufer, S., Lopez, R., and Pratap, S. 1988. Saber-C: an interpreter-based programming environment for the C language. In Proceedings of the Summer Usenix Conference, 161–171.Google Scholar
10. Lencevicius, R., Hölzle, U., and Singh, A. K. 1997. Query-based debugging of object-oriented programs. In OOPSLA ’97: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, ACM Press, 304–317. Google ScholarDigital Library
11. Lewis, B. 2003. Debugging backwards in time. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Automated Debugging, 225-235.Google Scholar
12. Linton, M. A. 1990. The evolution of Dbx. 211–220.Google Scholar
13. Microsoft, 2005. Microsoft PIX development tool. {online} http://msdn.microsoft.com/. Available since DirectX9 on XBox and Win32.Google Scholar
14. MIT. 1961. DDT. Tech. Rep. PDP-4-1 PDP-1 Computer, Department of Electrical Engineering, MIT.Google Scholar
15. NVIDIA, 2001. Nvparse. {online} http://developer.nvidia.com/nvparse.Google Scholar
16. Olano, M., 2005. Shader debugging in PixelFlow’s PfMan shader language, SGI’s OpenGL Shader, and RenderMan. Personal Communication (e-mail), Jan.Google Scholar
17. Purcell, T., and Sen, P., 2003. Shadesmith. {online} http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shadesmith/.Google Scholar
18. Purcell, T. 2004. Fragment program debugging tools. In SIGGRAPH 2004 GPGPU Course Notes.Google Scholar
19. Sistare, S., Allen, D., Bowker, R., Jourdenais, K., Simons, J., and Title, R. 1992. Data visualization and performance analysis in the prism programming environment. In Proceedings of the IFIP WG 10.3 Workshop on Programming Environments for Parallel Computing, North-Holland, 37–52. Google ScholarDigital Library
20. Stallman, R. M. 1989. GDB manual (the GNU source-level debugger). Tech. rep., Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA, Tel: (617) 876–3296, USA, Jan. Third Edition, GDB version 3.1.Google Scholar
21. Stephenson, I. 2000. Buffy, an sl development environment. BCS Conference on Digital Content Creation (April).Google Scholar
22. Trebilco, D., 2004. GLIntercept. {online} http://glintercept.nutty.org/.Google Scholar
23. Zeller, A., and Lütkehaus, D. 1996. DDD — a free graphical front-end for unix debuggers. SIGPLAN Not. 31, 1, 22–27. Google ScholarDigital Library
