research-article

SharC: checking data sharing strategies for multithreaded c

Authors:

Zachary Anderson,

Eric BrewerAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '08: Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 149 - 158

https://doi.org/10.1145/1375581.1375600

Published: 07 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Unintended or unmediated data sharing is a frequent cause of insidious bugs in multithreaded programs. We present a tool called SharC (short for Sharing Checker) that allows a user to write lightweight annotations to declare how they believe objects are being shared between threads in their program. SharC uses a combination of static and dynamic analyses to check that the program conforms to this specification.

SharC allows any type to have one of five "sharing modes" -- private to the current thread, read-only, shared under the control of a specified lock, intentionally racy, or checked dynamically. The dynamic mode uses run-time checking to verify that objects are either read-only, or only accessed by one thread. This allows us to check programs that would be difficult to check with a purely static system. If the user does not give a type an explicit annotation, then SharC uses a static type-qualifier analysis to infer that it is either private or should be checked dynamically.

SharC allows objects to move between different sharing modes at runtime by using reference counting to check that there are no other references to the objects when they change mode.

SharC's baseline dynamic analysis can check any C program, but is slow, and will generate false warnings about intentional data sharing. As the user adds more annotations, false warnings are reduced, and performance improves.We have found in practice that very few annotations are needed to describe all sharing and give reasonable performance. We ran SharC on 6 legacy C programs, summing to over 600k lines of code, and found that a total of only 60 simple annotations were needed to remove all false positives and to reduce performance overhead to only 2-14%.

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Cited By

Bai JChen QJiang ZLawall JHu S(2022)Hybrid Static-Dynamic Analysis of Data Races Caused by Inconsistent Locking Discipline in Device DriversIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.3138735(1-1)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3138735
Xu MKashyap SZhao HKim T(2020)Krace: Data Race Fuzzing for Kernel File Systems2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP40000.2020.00078(1643-1660)Online publication date: May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP40000.2020.00078
Jeong DKim KShivakumar BLee BShin I(2019)Razzer: Finding Kernel Race Bugs through Fuzzing2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP.2019.00017(754-768)Online publication date: May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2019.00017
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Index Terms

SharC: checking data sharing strategies for multithreaded c
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures

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cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '08: Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2008

396 pages

ISBN:9781595938602

DOI:10.1145/1375581

General Chair:
Rajiv Gupta
University of California, Riverside, USA
,
Program Chair:
Saman Amarasinghe
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 43, Issue 6
PLDI '08
June 2008
382 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1379022
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 07 June 2008

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data-race

Qualifiers

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PLDI '08

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PLDI '08: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 7 - 13, 2008

AZ, Tucson, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 406 of 2,067 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Bai JChen QJiang ZLawall JHu S(2022)Hybrid Static-Dynamic Analysis of Data Races Caused by Inconsistent Locking Discipline in Device DriversIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.3138735(1-1)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3138735
Xu MKashyap SZhao HKim T(2020)Krace: Data Race Fuzzing for Kernel File Systems2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP40000.2020.00078(1643-1660)Online publication date: May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP40000.2020.00078
Jeong DKim KShivakumar BLee BShin I(2019)Razzer: Finding Kernel Race Bugs through Fuzzing2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP.2019.00017(754-768)Online publication date: May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2019.00017
Arahori Y(2019)RangeLocker: Adaptive Range-Sensitive Lockset Analysis for Precise Dynamic Race Detection2019 IEEE 19th International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE)10.1109/HASE.2019.00036(184-191)Online publication date: Jan-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/HASE.2019.00036
Tzannes AHeumann SEloussi LVakilian MAdve VHan M(2019)Region and effect inference for safe parallelismAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-019-00257-326:2(463-509)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10515-019-00257-3
Bianchi FMargara APezze M(2018)A Survey of Recent Trends in Testing Concurrent Software SystemsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.270708944:8(747-783)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2017.2707089
Liu ZCriswell J(2017)Flexible and efficient memory object metadataACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3156685.309226852:9(36-46)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3156685.3092268
Liu ZCriswell JKirsch CTitzer B(2017)Flexible and efficient memory object metadataProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3092255.3092268(36-46)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3092255.3092268
Gu RJin GSong LZhu LLu SDi Nitto EHarman MHeymans P(2015)What change history tells us about thread synchronizationProceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2786805.2786815(426-438)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786805.2786815
Heumann STzannes AAdve V(2015)Scalable Task Scheduling and Synchronization Using Hierarchical EffectsProceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Parallel Architecture and Compilation (PACT)10.1109/PACT.2015.25(125-137)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/PACT.2015.25
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