Return Value Predictability Profiles for Self-Healing

Current embryonic attempts at software self - healing produce mechanisms that are often oblivious to the semantics of the code they supervise. The authors believe that, in order to help inform runtime repair strategies, such systems require a more detailed analysis of dynamic application behavior. The authors describe how to profile an application by analyzing all function calls (including library and system) made by a process. The authors create predictability profiles of the return values of those function calls. Self - healing mechanisms that rely on a transactional approach to repair (that is, rolling back execution to a known safe point in control flow or slicing off the current function sequence) can benefit from these return value predictability profiles.