article

Iterative context bounding for systematic testing of multithreaded programs

Authors:

Madanlal Musuvathi,

Shaz QadeerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 42, Issue 6

Pages 446 - 455

https://doi.org/10.1145/1273442.1250785

Published: 10 June 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Multithreaded programs are difficult to get right because of unexpected interaction between concurrently executing threads. Traditional testing methods are inadequate for catching subtle concurrency errors which manifest themselves late in the development cycle and post-deployment. Model checking or systematic exploration of program behavior is a promising alternative to traditional testing methods. However, it is difficult to perform systematic search on large programs as the number of possible program behaviors grows exponentially with the program size. Confronted with this state-explosion problem, traditional model checkers perform iterative depth-bounded search. Although effective for message-passing software, iterative depth-bounding is inadequate for multithreaded software.

This paper proposes iterative context-bounding, a new search algorithm that systematically explores the executions of a multithreaded program in an order that prioritizes executions with fewer context switches. We distinguish between preempting and nonpreempting context switches, and show that bounding the number of preempting context switches to a small number significantly alleviates the state explosion, without limiting the depth of explored executions. We show both theoretically and empirically that context-bounded search is an effective method for exploring the behaviors of multithreaded programs. We have implemented our algorithmin two model checkers and applied it to a number of real-world multithreaded programs. Our implementation uncovered 9 previously unknown bugs in our benchmarks, each of which was exposed by an execution with at most 2 preempting context switches. Our initial experience with the technique is encouraging and demonstrates that iterative context-bounding is a significant improvement over existing techniques for testing multithreaded programs.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 6

Proceedings of the 2007 PLDI conference

June 2007

491 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1273442

Issue’s Table of Contents

PLDI '07: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
June 2007
508 pages
ISBN:9781595936332
DOI:10.1145/1250734
General Chair:
Jeanne Ferrante
University of California, San Diego, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathryn S. McKinley
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 10 June 2007

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 42, Issue 6

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112077
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3552326.3567486
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