research-article

Volatiles are miscompiled, and what to do about it

Authors:

John RegehrAuthors Info & Claims

EMSOFT '08: Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Embedded software

Pages 255 - 264

https://doi.org/10.1145/1450058.1450093

Published: 19 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

C's volatile qualifier is intended to provide a reliable link between operations at the source-code level and operations at the memory-system level. We tested thirteen production-quality C compilers and, for each, found situations in which the compiler generated incorrect code for accessing volatile variables. This result is disturbing because it implies that embedded software and operating systems---both typically coded in C, both being bases for many mission-critical and safety-critical applications, and both relying on the correct translation of volatiles---may be being miscompiled.

Our contribution is centered on a novel technique for finding volatile bugs and a novel technique for working around them. First, we present access summary testing: an efficient, practical, and automatic way to detect code-generation errors related to the volatile qualifier. We have found a number of compiler bugs by performing access summary testing on randomly generated C programs. Some of these bugs have been confirmed and fixed by compiler developers. Second, we present and evaluate a workaround for the compiler defects we discovered. In 96% of the cases in which one of our randomly generated programs is miscompiled, we can cause the faulty C compiler to produce correctly behaving code by applying a straightforward source-level transformation to the test program.

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Digital Library

Cited By

Wang QJung R(2024)Rustlantis: Randomized Differential Testing of the Rust CompilerProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36897808:OOPSLA2(1955-1981)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
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Seeker VCummins CCole MFranke BHazelwood KLeather HGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)Revealing Compiler Heuristics through Automated Discovery and OptimizationProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444847(55-66)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444847
Geeson LSmith LGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)Compiler Testing with Relaxed Memory ModelsProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444836(334-348)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
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Index Terms

Volatiles are miscompiled, and what to do about it
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

EMSOFT '08: Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Embedded software

October 2008

284 pages

ISBN:9781605584683

DOI:10.1145/1450058

Program Chairs:
Luca de Alfaro
University of California, Santa Cruz
,
Jens Palsberg
University of California, Los Angeles

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: 19 October 2008

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ESWEEK 08

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ESWEEK 08: Fourth Embedded Systems Week

October 19 - 24, 2008

GA, Atlanta, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 60 of 203 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Wang QJung R(2024)Rustlantis: Randomized Differential Testing of the Rust CompilerProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36897808:OOPSLA2(1955-1981)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689780
Seeker VCummins CCole MFranke BHazelwood KLeather HGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)Revealing Compiler Heuristics through Automated Discovery and OptimizationProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444847(55-66)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444847
Geeson LSmith LGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)Compiler Testing with Relaxed Memory ModelsProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444836(334-348)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444836
Zhao YChen JFu RYe HWang ZJust RFraser G(2023)Testing the Compiler for a New-Born Programming Language: An Industrial Case Study (Experience Paper)Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3598077(551-563)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597926.3598077
Wu JYang YZhou Y(2023)Boosting Compiler Testing via Eliminating Test Programs with Long-Execution-Time2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER56733.2023.00061(593-603)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER56733.2023.00061
Tu HJiang HLi XRen ZZhou ZJiang L(2022)Remgen: Remanufacturing a Random Program Generator for Compiler Testing2022 IEEE 33rd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE55969.2022.00057(529-540)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE55969.2022.00057
Cheng KDu GWu TChen LShi G(2022)Automated Vulnerable Codes Mutation through Deep Learning for Variability Detection2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9892444(1-8)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
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Liu LMillstein TMusuvathi M(2021)Safe-by-default Concurrency for Modern Programming LanguagesACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/346220643:3(1-50)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2021
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Livinskii VBabokin DRegehr J(2020)Random testing for C and C++ compilers with YARPGenProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282644:OOPSLA(1-25)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
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Serban APoll EVisser J(2020)Adversarial Examples on Object RecognitionACM Computing Surveys10.1145/339839453:3(1-38)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
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