AtomTracker: A Comprehensive Approach to Atomic Region Inference and Violation Detection

A particularly insidious type of concurrency bug is atomicity violations. While there has been substantial work on automatic detection of atomicity violations, each existing technique has focused on a certain type of atomic region. To address this limitation, this paper presents AtomTracker, a comprehensive approach to atomic region inference and violation detection. AtomTracker is the first scheme to (1) automatically infer generic atomic regions (not limited by issues such as the number of variables accessed, the number of instructions included, or the type of code construct the region is embedded in) and (2) automatically detect violations of them at runtime with negligible execution overhead. AtomTracker provides novel algorithms to infer generic atomic regions and to detect atomicity violations of them. Moreover, we present a hardware implementation of the violation detection algorithm that leverages cache coherence state transitions in a multiprocessor. In our evaluation, we tak...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Abdullah Muzahid, Norimasa Otsuki, Josep Torrellas
• Keywords: Atomic Regions, Atomicity Violations, Generic Atomic Regions, Hardware, MICRO 2010