A dynamic predictive race detector for C/C++ programs

Abstract

Concurrent techniques have been widely adopted in software systems, and data race has become a great threat to stability and security of concurrent systems. Previous precise race detection techniques either may miss many races, or are only suitable for some specific programs, such as the programs executed in a virtual machine rather than in actual hardware. To solves these problems, this paper introduces a dynamic predictive race detector, called LayDetect, which detects predictable races in C/C++ programs. LayDetect applies an innovative layering technique, which can detect more races than other detectors, such as FastTrack. We have implemented and evaluated LayDetect with well-known benchmarks and real-world applications. LayDetect has detected 3.7 M races at run-time which is more than that of FastTrack by two orders of magnitude, while the average slowdown (3.0 $$\times $$ ) and space overhead (34.1 MB) of LayDetect are similar to that of FastTrack.