A randomized scheduler with probabilistic guarantees of finding bugs

Burckhardt, Sebastian; Kothari, Pravesh K.; Musuvathi, Madanlal; Nagarakatte, Santosh

doi:10.1145/1736020.1736040

Cited by 191 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Systematic Scheduler (including PCT [10]). These schedulers aim to detect concurrency bugs in general, and are unaware of specific bug information provided to them.…”

Section: Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These schedulers aim to detect concurrency bugs in general, and are unaware of specific bug information provided to them. Their ability to expose deadlocks is very low [10].…”

Section: Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given a multithreaded program, PCT firstly chooses a set of priority change points [10] (e.g., right before site s15 for t2 and right after site s07 for t1), and lowers the priority of a thread when the thread is about to execute any statement that is a change point [10]. If PCT happens to work like Schedule 1, it can trigger the deadlock.…”

Section: Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The experimental results show that, compared to existing techniques (DeadlockFuzzer [22], MagicScheduler [12], and PCT [10]), ASN can either confirm more real deadlocks on the same benchmark or trigger the same deadlock bugs with significantly higher probability and incur significantly less thrashing. In the experiment, ASN incurs high performance overheads.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…They prevent program executions from terminating correctly. Generic techniques can expose different kinds of concurrency bugs but only with a very low bug triggering ability [10]. On the other hand, techniques that precisely detect specific kinds of deadlocks are still unable to handle large-scale programs [24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

ASN: A Dynamic Barrier-Based Approach to Confirmation of Deadlocks from Warnings for Large-Scale Multithreaded Programs

Cai

Jia

et al. 2015

IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst.

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Many large-scale multithreaded programs incur deadlock bugs. Existing deadlock warning detection techniques only report warning scenarios, which may or may not be real deadlocks. Each warning should be further verified on whether it may manifest into a real deadlock. For this purpose, a number of active randomized testing schedulers have been developed to trigger them, and yet pervious experiments show that their deadlock confirmation probability can be low. This paper presents ASN, a novel barrier-based randomized scheduler that triggers real deadlocks with high probabilities. We exploit the insights that in a confirmation run, the threads involved in a real deadlock should properly acquire one or more sets of locks prior to deadlocking. ASN automatically identifies three interesting sets of such positions. It guides the threads participating in a given warning to stay at these position sets in turn. When all the threads are staying at the last position set, ASN checks whether any deadlock that matches with the given warning has been triggered. We have evaluated ASN on 15 deadlock bugs in a suite of real-world multithreaded programs. The results show that ASN either confirms more deadlocks from the benchmark suite or triggers the same deadlocks with significantly higher probabilities than existing schedulers.

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“…Systematic Scheduler (including PCT [10]). These schedulers aim to detect concurrency bugs in general, and are unaware of specific bug information provided to them.…”

Section: Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These schedulers aim to detect concurrency bugs in general, and are unaware of specific bug information provided to them. Their ability to expose deadlocks is very low [10].…”

Section: Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

ASN: A Dynamic Barrier-Based Approach to Confirmation of Deadlocks from Warnings for Large-Scale Multithreaded Programs

Cai

Jia

et al. 2015

IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst.

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Structural testing for message‐passing concurrent programs: an extended test model

Souza

Zaluska

2012

Concurrency and Computation

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SUMMARYDeveloping high-quality, error-free message-passing concurrent programs is not trivial. Although a number of different primitives with associated semantics are available to assist such development, they often increase the complexity of the testing process. In this paper, we extend our previous test model for messagepassing programs and present new structural testing criteria, taking into account additional features used in this paradigm, such as collective communication, non-blocking sends, distinct semantics for non-blocking receives, and persistent operations. Our new model also recognizes that sender primitives cannot always be matched with every receive primitive. This improvement allows us to remove statically a significant number of infeasible synchronization edges that would otherwise have to be analyzed later by the tester. In this paper, the test model is presented using the Message-Passing Interface standard; however, our new model has been designed to be flexible, and it can be configured to support a range of different messagepassing environments or languages. We have carried out case studies showing the applicability of the new test model to represent message-passing programs and also to reveal errors, mainly those errors related to inter-process communication. In addition to increasing the number of features supported by the test model, we have also reduced the overall cost of testing significantly. Our case studies suggest that the number of synchronization edges can be reduced by up to 93%, mainly by eliminating infeasible edges between unmatchable communication primitives. The main contribution of the paper is to present a more flexible test model that provides improved coverage for message-passing programs and at the same time reduces the cost of testing significantly.

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AVPredictor: Comprehensive prediction and detection of atomicity violations

Wang

Krinke

Zhou

et al. 2019

Concurrency and Computation

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Summary Concurrency bugs, such as atomicity‐violation bugs, are difficult to detect due to the uncertainty of thread‐scheduling. It is particularly difficult to conduct a thorough bug fix when an atomicity‐violation bug can be triggered by different buggy interleavings. This paper proposes a prediction‐based approach to comprehensively detect atomicity‐violation bugs. A bug fix can be incomplete when the developer cannot have all the buggy interleavings. Based on the candidate interleavings, this approach can predict unmanifested atomicity‐violation bugs from a non‐buggy execution and comprehensively display all the buggy interleavings for the same bug to assist a thorough fix. We use a monitored execution to record execution traces and predict potential buggy interleavings based on the candidate interleavings identified from the trace. Then, we use controlled executions to verify the predicted buggy interleavings by controlling the thread‐scheduling. We implemented a prototype tool called AVPredictor and evaluated it with real‐world tests. Experiments show that AVPredictor can effectively find all the known atomicity‐violation bugs as well as a previously unknown bug together with all the buggy interleavings for each bug. The runtime overhead is 13x for the monitored execution and 18x for the controlled execution.

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A randomized scheduler with probabilistic guarantees of finding bugs

Cited by 191 publications

References 26 publications

ASN: A Dynamic Barrier-Based Approach to Confirmation of Deadlocks from Warnings for Large-Scale Multithreaded Programs

ASN: A Dynamic Barrier-Based Approach to Confirmation of Deadlocks from Warnings for Large-Scale Multithreaded Programs

Structural testing for message‐passing concurrent programs: an extended test model

AVPredictor: Comprehensive prediction and detection of atomicity violations

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