Modern managed languages, such as Java and C#, derive many software engineering benefits from the use of virtual machines. While the performance penalty of VMs has received significant attention, the information penalty has not: extra layers of virtualization make program behavior (and misbehavior) much more difficult to understand. The garbage collector, for example, takes over the job of freeing objects, eliminating a large class of memory errors. As a result, however, programmers no longer know when, if ever, objects are reclaimed. Our work explores a solution called VM introspection, which gives programmers an interface for asking the virtual machine specific questions about program behavior at runtime. Our focus is on information that is readily available or can be computed cheaply enough for use in deployed software.

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