Learning from mistakes: a comprehensive study on real world concurrency bug characteristics

The reality of multi-core hardware has made concurrent programs pervasive. Unfortunately, writing correct concurrent programs is difficult. Addressing this challenge requires advances in multiple directions, including concurrency bug detection, concurrent program testing, concurrent programming model design, etc. Designing effective techniques in all these directions will significantly benefit from a deep understanding of real world concurrency bug characteristics. This paper provides the first (to the best of our knowledge) comprehensive real world concurrency bug characteristic study. Specifically, we have carefully examined concurrency bug patterns, manifestation, and fix strategies of 105 randomly selected real world concurrency bugs from 4 representative server and client opensource applications (MySQL, Apache, Mozilla and OpenOffice). Our study reveals several interesting findings and provides useful guidance for concurrency bug detection, testing, and concurrent programming lan...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Shan Lu, Soyeon Park, Eunsoo Seo, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2008, Concurrency Bugs, Concurrent Programs, Programming Languages, World Concurrency Bugs