Producing scheduling that causes concurrent programs to fail

A noise maker is a tool that seeds a concurrent program with conditional synchronization primitives (such as yield()) for the purpose of increasing the likelihood that a bug manifest itself. This work explores the theory and practice of choosing where in the program to induce such thread switches at runtime. We introduce a novel fault model that classifies locations as “good”, “neutral”, or “bad,” based on the effect of a thread switch at the location. Using the model we explore the terms in which efficient search for real-life concurrent bugs can be carried out. We accordingly justify the use of probabilistic algorithms for this search and gain a deeper insight of the work done so far on noise-making. We validate our approach by experimenting with a set of programs taken from publicly available multi-threaded benchmark. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that real-life behavior is similar to one derived from the model. D.2.5 Testing and Debugging: Concurrent programs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Yosi Ben-Asher, Yaniv Eytani, Eitan Farchi, Shmuel Ur
• Keywords: Concurrent Programs, Conditional Synchronization Primitives, ISSTA 2006, Real-life Concurrent Bugs