StealthTest: Low Overhead Online Software Testing Using Transactional Memory

—Software testing is hard. The emergence of multicore architectures and the proliferation of bugprone multithreaded software makes testing even harder. To this end, researchers have proposed methods to continue testing software after deployment, e.g., in vivo (IV) testing and Delta Execution (DE) patch testing. These on-line techniques typically fork new processes to hide the functional impact of testing. Unfortunately, the high overhead of fork() significantly degrades performance. To reduce the performance overhead of online testing, we adapt transactional memory (TM) to isolate the functional effects of tests with minimal impact on system performance. We propose StealthTest, an interface that exposes TM transactions as the key mechanism for executing tests. It allows online tests to work on a consistent view of memory without the overhead of creating new processes. Moreover, explicitly aborting the test transaction after it is done guarantees that its changes are invisible to the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IEEEPACT
• Authors: Jayaram Bobba, Weiwei Xiong, Luke Yen, Mark D. Hill, David A. Wood
• Keywords: Delta Execution, Hardware, IEEEPACT 2009, Online Testing, Software Makes Testing