research-article

Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugs

Authors:

Andres Jaan Tack,

Michael M. Swift,

Shan LuAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 47, Issue 4

Pages 211 - 222

https://doi.org/10.1145/2248487.2150999

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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Cited By

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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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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 47, Issue 4

ASPLOS '12

April 2012

453 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2248487

Issue’s Table of Contents

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

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

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Published: 03 March 2012

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 47, Issue 4

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2021.3122993
Wang PKrinke JZhou XLu K(2019)AVPredictor: Comprehensive prediction and detection of atomicity violationsConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.516031:15Online publication date: 20-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.5160
Wang PLu KLi GZhou X(2017)A survey of the double‐fetch vulnerabilitiesConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.434530:6Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4345
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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
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