research-article

Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugs

Authors:

Andres Jaan Tack,

Michael M. Swift,

Shan LuAuthors Info & Claims

ASPLOS XVII: Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Pages 211 - 222

https://doi.org/10.1145/2150976.2150999

Published: 03 March 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Multithreaded programs often suffer from synchronization bugs such as atomicity violations and deadlocks. These bugs arise from complicated locking strategies and ad hoc synchronization methods to avoid the use of locks. A survey of the bug databases of major open-source applications shows that concurrency bugs often take multiple fix attempts, and that fixes often introduce yet more concurrency bugs. Transactional memory (TM) enables programmers to declare regions of code atomic without specifying a lock and has the potential to avoid these bugs. Where most previous studies have focused on using TM to write new programs from scratch, we consider its utility in fixing existing programs with concurrency bugs. We therefore investigate four methods of using TM on three concurrent programs. Overall, we find that 29% of the bugs are not fixable by transactional memory, showing that TM does not address many important types of concurrency bugs. In particular, TM works poorly with extremely long critical sections and with deadlocks involving both condition variables and I/O. Conversely, we find that for 56% of the bugs, transactional memory offers demonstrable value by simplifying the reasoning behind a fix or the effort to implement a fix, and using transactions in the first place would have avoided 71% of the bugs examined. We also find that ad hoc synchronization put in place to avoid the overhead of locking can be greatly simplified with TM, but requires hardware support to perform well.

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Index Terms

Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugs
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. 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. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages

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cover image ACM Conferences

ASPLOS XVII: Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

March 2012

476 pages

ISBN:9781450307598

DOI:10.1145/2150976

General Chair:
Tim Harris
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chair:
Michael L. Scott
University of Rochester

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 40, Issue 1
ASPLOS '12
March 2012
453 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/2189750
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ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 47, Issue 4
ASPLOS '12
April 2012
453 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
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Yan LPan YZhou DCandea GKashyap S(2024)Transparent Multicore Scaling of Single-Threaded Network FunctionsProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3629591(1142-1159)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627703.3629591
Chen YWang SLu SSankaralingam K(2019)Applying Transactional Memory for Concurrency-Bug Failure Recovery in Production RunsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2018.287765630:5(990-1006)Online publication date: 1-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2018.2877656
Yu ZZuo YZhao Y(2019)Convoider: A Concurrency Bug Avoider Based on Transparent Software Transactional MemoryInternational Journal of Parallel Programming10.1007/s10766-019-00642-1Online publication date: 12-Sep-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-019-00642-1
Liu HChen YLu SZimmermann TCleland-Huang JSu Z(2016)Understanding and generating high quality patches for concurrency bugsProceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2950290.2950309(715-726)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
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Zhang MWu YLu SQi SRen JZheng W(2016)A Lightweight System for Detecting and Tolerating Concurrency BugsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2016.253166642:10(899-917)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
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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
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Zhang Wde Kruijf MLi ALu SSankaralingam K(2013)ConAirACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2499368.245112948:4(113-126)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2013
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