Collaborative Technique for Concurrency Bug Detection

Abstract

Concurrency bugs hidden in deployed software can cause severe failures and real-world disasters. They are notoriously difficult to detect during in-house testing due to huge and non-deterministic interleaving space. Unfortunately, the multicore technology trend worsens this problem. Unlike previous work that detects particular concurrency bugs (e.g., data races and atomicity violations), we target harmful concurrency bugs that cause program failures. In order to detect harmful concurrency bugs effectively and efficiently, we propose an innovative, collaborative approach called ColFinder. First, ColFinder statically analyzes the program to identify potential concurrency bugs. ColFinder then uses static program slicing to get smaller programs with respect to potential concurrency bugs. Finally, ColFinder dynamically controls thread scheduler to force multiple threads access the same memory location, verifying whether the potential concurrency bug will cause program failure. If a failure occurs, a harmful concurrency bug is detected. We have implemented ColFinder as a prototype tool and have experimented on a number of real-world concurrent programs. The probability of bug manifestation in these programs is only 0.64 % averagely during native execution. It is significantly raised to 90 % with ColFinder. The runtime overhead imposed by many previous approaches is always more than 10 $$\times $$ × . The overhead of ColFinder is more acceptable, with an average of 79 %. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first technique that introduces program slicing to reduce the time of bug manifestation, with an average of 33 %.