Tolerating Concurrency Bugs Using Transactions as Lifeguards

Abstract--Parallel programming is hard, because it is impractical to test all possible thread interleavings. One promising approach to improve a multi-threaded program's reliability is to constrain a production run's thread interleavings in such a way that untested interleavings are avoided as much as possible. Such an approach would avoid hard-to-test rare thread interleavings in production runs, and thereby improve correctness. However, a key challenge in realizing this goal is in determining thread interleaving constraints from the tested correct interleavings, and enforcing them efficiently in production runs. In this paper, we propose a new method to determine thread interleaving constraints from the tested interleavings in the form of lifeguard transactions (LifeTxes). An untested code region initially is contained in a single LifeTx. As the code region is tested over more thread interleavings, its original LifeTx is automatically split into multiple smaller LifeTxes so...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Jie Yu, Satish Narayanasamy
• Keywords: Concurrency Bugs, Hardware, MICRO 2010, Production Runs, Thread Interleavings