RADISH: Always-on sound and complete race detection in software and hardware

Data-race freedom is a valuable safety property for multithreaded programs that helps with catching bugs, simplifying memory consistency model semantics, and verifying and enforcing both atomicity and determinism. Unfortunately, existing software-only dynamic race detectors are precise but slow; proposals with hardware support offer higher performance but are imprecise. Both precision and performance are necessary to achieve the many advantages always-on dynamic race detection could provide. To resolve this trade-off, we propose RADISH, a hybrid hardware-software dynamic race detector that is always-on and fully precise. In RADISH, hardware caches a principled subset of the metadata necessary for race detection; this subset allows the vast majority of race checks to occur completely in hardware. A flexible software layer handles persistence of race detection metadata on cache evictions and occasional queries to this expanded set of metadata. We show that RADISH is correct by proving ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Joseph Devietti, Benjamin P. Wood, Karin Strauss, Luis Ceze, Dan Grossman, Shaz Qadeer
• Keywords: Hardware, Hardware Caches, ISCA 2012, Memory Consistency Model, Model Semantics