Predicting null-pointer dereferences in concurrent programs

Farzan, Azadeh; Madhusudan, P.; Razavi, Niloofar; Sorrentino, Francesco

doi:10.1145/2393596.2393651

Cited by 38 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…We have compared MCR with ICB and DPOR on a variety of popular multithreaded benchmarks (shown in Figure 1) collected from recent concurrency studies [9,16] including two real-world large applications. In this section, we focus on answering three questions: 1.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stateless model checking concurrent programs with maximal causality reduction

Huang

2015

Proceedings of the 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

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We present maximal causality reduction (MCR), a new technique for stateless model checking. MCR systematically explores the state-space of concurrent programs with a provably minimal number of executions. Each execution corresponds to a distinct maximal causal model extracted from a given execution trace, which captures the largest possible set of causally equivalent executions. Moreover, MCR is embarrassingly parallel by shifting the runtime exploration cost to offline analysis. We have designed and implemented MCR using a constraint-based approach and compared with iterative context bounding (ICB) and dynamic partial order reduction (DPOR) on both benchmarks and real-world programs. MCR reduces the number of executions explored by ICB and ICB+DPOR by orders of magnitude, and significantly improves the scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness of the state-of-the-art for both state-space exploration and bug finding. In our experiments, MCR also revealed several new data races and null pointer dereference errors in frequently studied real-world programs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stateless model checking concurrent programs with maximal causality reduction

Huang

2015

Proceedings of the 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

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“…To alleviate the interleaving explosion problem that is inherent in the analysis of concurrent programs a wide range of heuristic-based techniques has been developed. Most of these techniques [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30] do not provide meaningful coverage guarantees, i.e., a precise notion of what tests cover. Other such techniques [31], [32], [33], [34], [35] provide coverage guarantees only over the space of interleavings by fixing the input values during the testing process.…”

Section: Discussion Of Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perspectives on White-Box Testing: Coverage, Concurrency, and Concolic Execution

Farzan

Holzer

Veith

2015

2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)

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The last years have seen a fruitful exchange of ideas between automated software verification and white-box software testing; the industrial impact of concolic testing for sequential software is the most notable result of this interdisciplinary effort. While concolic testing is very successful at finding bugs, and even achieves verification in the limit, it is often hard to quantify the progress it achieves towards verification. In this paper, we survey two recent projects which aim to remedy this situation: In the FQL project, we devise a test specification language which facilitates precise specification of coverage criteria, and a separation of concerns between test specification and test case generation. In con2colic testing, we develop a concolic testing methodology for concurrent programs where progress is measured in terms of the data flow between program threads.

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“…To improve the reliability of concurrent programs, many techniques based on manipulating schedules are proposed [5,7,11,12,31]. Cui et al [4,5,34] propose schedule specialization to guard against bugs caused due to nondeterminism.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Huang and Zhang [11] design a tool PECAN to generate a feasible schedule for access anomalies in programs that use locks in a nested way. Farzan et al [7] propose an approach for identifying alternative interleavings that detect null pointer dereferences in concurrent programs using SMT solvers. Sinha and Wang [31] differentiate between intra-thread and inter-thread semantics to reduce the number of possible interleavings that need to be explored.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trace driven dynamic deadlock detection and reproduction

Samak

Ramanathan

2014

Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

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Dynamic analysis techniques have been proposed to detect potential deadlocks. Analyzing and comprehending each potential deadlock to determine whether the deadlock is feasible in a real execution requires significant programmer effort. Moreover, empirical evidence shows that existing analyses are quite imprecise. This imprecision of the analyses further void the manual effort invested in reasoning about non-existent defects.In this paper, we address the problems of imprecision of existing analyses and the subsequent manual effort necessary to reason about deadlocks. We propose a novel approach for deadlock detection by designing a dynamic analysis that intelligently leverages execution traces. To reduce the manual effort, we replay the program by making the execution follow a schedule derived based on the observed trace. For a real deadlock, its feasibility is automatically verified if the replay causes the execution to deadlock.We have implemented our approach as part of WOLF and have analyzed many large (upto 160KLoC) Java programs. Our experimental results show that we are able to identify 74% of the reported defects as true (or false) positives automatically leaving very few defects for manual analysis. The overhead of our approach is negligible making it a compelling tool for practical adoption.

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Predicting null-pointer dereferences in concurrent programs

Cited by 38 publications

References 31 publications

Stateless model checking concurrent programs with maximal causality reduction

Stateless model checking concurrent programs with maximal causality reduction

Perspectives on White-Box Testing: Coverage, Concurrency, and Concolic Execution

Trace driven dynamic deadlock detection and reproduction

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