Adaptively generating high quality fixes for atomicity violations

Abstract

It is difficult to fix atomicity violations correctly. Existing gate lock algorithm (GLA) simply inserts gate locks to serialize exe-cutions, which may introduce performance bugs and deadlocks. Synthesized context-aware gate locks (by Grail) require complex source code synthesis. We propose Fixer to adaptively fix ato-micity violations. It firstly analyses the lock acquisitions of an atomicity violation. Then it either adjusts the existing lock scope or inserts a gate lock. The former addresses cases where some locks are used but fail to provide atomic accesses. For the latter, it infers the visibility (being global or a field of a class/struct) of the gate lock such that the lock only protects related accesses. For both cases, Fixer further eliminates new lock orders to avoid introducing deadlocks. Of course, Fixer can produce both kinds of fixes on atomicity violations with locks. The experi-mental results on 15 previously used atomicity violations show that: Fixer correctly fixed all 15 atomicity violations without introducing deadlocks. However, GLA and Grail both intro-duced 5 deadlocks. HFix (that only targets on fixing certain types of atomicity violations) only fixed 2 atomicity violations and introduced 4 deadlocks. Fixer also provides an alternative way to insert gate locks (by inserting gate locks with proper visibility) considering fix acceptance.