CTrigger: exposing atomicity violation bugs from their hiding places

Multicore hardware is making concurrent programs pervasive. Unfortunately, concurrent programs are prone to bugs. Among different types of concurrency bugs, atomicity violation bugs are common and important. Existing techniques to detect atomicity violation bugs suffer from one limitation: requiring bugs to manifest during monitored runs, which is an open problem in concurrent program testing. This paper makes two contributions. First, it studies the interleaving characteristics of the common practice in concurrent program testing (i.e., running a program over and over) to understand why atomicity violation bugs are hard to expose. Second, it proposes CTrigger to effectively and efficiently expose atomicity violation bugs in large programs. CTrigger focuses on a special type of interleavings (i.e., unserializable interleavings) that are inherently correlated to atomicity violation bugs, and uses trace analysis to systematically identify (likely) feasible unserializable interleavings w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Soyeon Park, Shan Lu, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2009, Atomicity Violation Bugs, Difficult-to-catch Atomicity Violation, Programming Languages, Real-world Atomicity Violation