Finding concurrency bugs with context-aware communication graphs

Incorrect thread synchronization often leads to concurrency bugs that manifest nondeterministically and are difficult to detect and fix. Past work on detecting concurrency bugs has addressed the general problem in an ad-hoc fashion, focusing mostly on data races and atomicity violations. Using graph...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2009 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) pp. 553 - 563
Main Authors: Lucia, Brandon, Ceze, Luis
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 12.12.2009
IEEE
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Application software
Computer architecture
Computer bugs
Computer systems organization > Architectures > Parallel architectures > Multiple instruction, multiple data
Computing methodologies > Concurrent computing methodologies > Concurrent programming languages
Concurrent computing
Context
Degradation
Design
Inspection
Multicore processing
Reliability
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis > Software testing and debugging
Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language types > Concurrent programming languages
Software performance
Yarn
ISBN:9781605587981, 1605587982
ISSN:1072-4451
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Incorrect thread synchronization often leads to concurrency bugs that manifest nondeterministically and are difficult to detect and fix. Past work on detecting concurrency bugs has addressed the general problem in an ad-hoc fashion, focusing mostly on data races and atomicity violations. Using graphs to represent a multithreaded program execution is very natural, nodes represent static instructions and edges represent communication via shared memory. In this paper we make the fundamental observation that such basic context-oblivious graphs do not encode enough information to enable accurate bug detection. We propose context-aware communication graphs, a new kind of communication graph that encodes global ordering information by embedding communication contexts. We then build Bugaboo, a simple and generic framework that accurately detects complex concurrency bugs. Our framework collects communication graphs from multiple executions and uses invariant-based techniques to detect anomalies in the graphs. We built two versions of Bugaboo: BB-SW, which is fully implemented in software but suffers from significant slowdowns; and BB-HW, which relies on custom architecture support but has negligible performance degradation. BB-HW requires modest extensions to a commodity multicore processor and can be used in deployment settings. We evaluate both versions using applications such as MySQL, Apache, PARSEC, and several others. Our results show that Bugaboo identifies a wide variety of concurrency bugs, including challenging multivariable bugs, with few (often zero) unnecessary code inspections.
ISBN:9781605587981
1605587982
ISSN:1072-4451
DOI:10.1145/1669112.1669181