Affiliation:
1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
2. Aarhus University, Denmark
Abstract
Concurrent programs are notoriously hard to write correctly, as scheduling nondeterminism introduces subtle errors that are both hard to detect and to reproduce. The most common concurrency errors are (data) races, which occur when memory-conflicting actions are executed concurrently. Consequently, considerable effort has been made towards developing efficient techniques for race detection. The most common approach is dynamic race prediction: given an observed, race-free trace σ of a concurrent program, the task is to decide whether events of σ can be correctly reordered to a trace σ
*
that witnesses a race hidden in σ.
In this work we introduce the notion of sync(hronization)-preserving races. A sync-preserving race occurs in σ when there is a witness σ
*
in which synchronization operations (e.g., acquisition and release of locks) appear in the same order as in σ. This is a broad definition that strictly subsumes the famous notion of happens-before races. Our main results are as follows. First, we develop a sound and complete algorithm for predicting sync-preserving races. For moderate values of parameters like the number of threads, the algorithm runs in Õ(
N
) time and space, where
N
is the length of the trace σ. Second, we show that the problem has a Ω(
N
/log
2
N
) space lower bound, and thus our algorithm is essentially time and space optimal. Third, we show that predicting races with even just a single reversal of two sync operations is NP-complete and even W1-hard when parameterized by the number of threads. Thus, sync-preservation characterizes exactly the tractability boundary of race prediction, and our algorithm is nearly optimal for the tractable side. Our experiments show that our algorithm is fast in practice, while sync-preservation characterizes races often missed by state-of-the-art methods.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality,Software
Cited by
18 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Reorder Pointer Flow in Sound Concurrency Bug Prediction;Proceedings of the 46th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering;2024-02-06
2. Predictive Monitoring against Pattern Regular Languages;Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages;2024-01-05
3. How Hard Is Weak-Memory Testing?;Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages;2024-01-05
4. Coarser Equivalences for Causal Concurrency;Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages;2024-01-05
5. Precise Dynamic Data Race Prediction for Interrupt-Driven Embedded Software;2023 IEEE 34th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW);2023-10-09