Debugging virtual machines can be challenging. Advanced debugging techniques using execution trace analysis can simplify debugging, but they often show only the execution of the virtual machine (in terms of machine instructions) and not the execution of the guest program (in terms of VM instructions). Ideally, the virtual machine as well as the guest program should be inspectable simultaneously to quickly locate the bug.

Our approach provides a debugging environment which uses an execution trace of a virtual machine and derives the execution trace of the guest program running on it. The transformation is performed by transformation rules which inspect events from the virtual machine’s execution trace, collect necessary information, and then emit the events of the guest program’s execution trace. By linking both traces, navigation in the virtual machine’s execution trace is greatly simplified. When analyzing a simple virtual machine, our approach causes a 9.6% slowdown and an increase of 22% in memory consumption of the underlying execution trace analysis tool.