Understanding the interleaving-space overlap across inputs and software versions

Abstract

In the multi-core era, it is critical to effectively test multithreaded software and expose concurrency bugs before software release. Previous work has made a lot of progress in exercising the interleaving space and detecting concurrency bugs under a given input. Unfortunately, since software often has many test inputs and constant pressure to release new versions, existing techniques are still too expensive in practice. In this position paper, we use open-source software to study how interleavings, data races and atomicity violations particularly, overlap across test inputs and software versions. We also conduct preliminary explorations to improve the testing efficiency of multi-threaded software by avoiding redundant analysis across inputs and software versions.