We present a temporal debugger, capable of examining temporal behavior of operating systems. The debugger is based on a simulator modeling an entire workstation at the instruction level. Unlike traditional debuggers, which need to interfere with program execution, a simulation-based debugger can operate without disturbing time flow of the simulated system. This allows non-intrusive and reproducible debugging of general-purpose operating systems, such as Linux.

We demonstrate the utility of the temporal debugger by analyzing two time sensitive parts of Linux, scheduling and interrupt handling. We show how our tool allows a user to identify and isolate temporally unsatisfactory behavior, and examine short sequences in detail.

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