Pesticide: Using SMT Processors to Improve Performance of Pointer Bug Detection

Pointer bugs associated with dynamically-allocated objects resulting in out-of-bounds memory access are an important class of software bugs. Because such bugs cannot be detected easily via static-checking techniques, dynamic monitoring schemes have been proposed. However, the key challenge with dynamic monitoring schemes is the runtime overhead (slowdowns of the order of 10x are common). Previous approaches have used thread-level speculation (TLS) to reduce the overhead. However, the approaches still incur substantial slowdowns while requiring complex TLS hardware. We make the key observation that because the monitor code and user code are largely and unambiguously independent, TLS hardware with all its complexity to handle speculative parallelism is unnecessary. We explicitly multithread the monitor code in which a thread checks one access and use SMT to exploit the parallelism in the monitor code. Despite multithreading the monitor code on SMT, dynamic monitoring slows down the user...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: Jin-Yi Wang, Yen-Shiang Shue, T. N. Vijaykumar, Saurabh Bagchi
• Keywords: Dynamic Monitoring Schemes, Hardware, ICCD 2006, Monitor Code, Monitor Threads