Software and Programmer Efficiency Research Group

Jikes RDB — or RDB for short — is a debugger for the Jikes Research Virtual Machine. When debugging their virtual machine, Jikes RVM developers so far had to resort to inserting VM.sysWrite() calls into their code, or to using gdb without much symbolic information. Jikes RDB changes this. It provides a visual debugger with insight into all aspects of the running virtual machine and application.

RDB is working today with the following core features: inspecting heap objects and RVM structures, inspecting compiled code on the machine code and bytecode level, setting breakpoints and single-stepping, and viewing threads, stacks, and registers of the Jikes RVM process.

We recently ported Jikes RDB to LLDB, which allows it to be used on Linux as well as OS X.

Videos

Watch our four videos introducing Jikes RDB.

Getting Started

Our Getting Started Guide walks you through getting, building, and running Jikes RDB.

Download

For more information on getting RDB read our download page.

Tutorial

Come see our OOPSLA'13 tutorial on Jikes RVM to see Jikes RDB in action.

Publication

• PPPJ'13. Jikes RDB: A Debugger for the Jikes RVM