GAMBIT: effective unit testing for concurrency libraries

As concurrent programming becomes prevalent, software providers are investing in concurrency libraries to improve programmer productivity. Concurrency libraries improve productivity by hiding error-prone, low-level synchronization from programmers and proigher-level concurrent abstractions. Testing such libraries is difficult, however, because concurrency failures often manifest only under particular scheduling circumstances. Current best testing practices are often inadequate: heuristic-guided fuzzing is not systematic, systematic schedule enumeration does not find bugs quickly, and stress testing is neither systematic nor fast. To address these shortcomings, we propose a prioritized search technique called GAMBIT that combines the speed benefits of heuristic-guided fuzzing with the soundness, progress, and reproducibility guarantees of stateless model checking. GAMBIT combines known techniques such as partial-order reduction and preemption-bounding with a generalized best-first sear...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Katherine E. Coons, Sebastian Burckhardt, Madanlal Musuvathi
• Keywords: Concurrency Libraries, Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2010, Stateless Model Checking, Verification Keywords Concurrency