research-article

CTrigger: exposing atomicity violation bugs from their hiding places

Authors:

Yuanyuan ZhouAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 44, Issue 3

Pages 25 - 36

https://doi.org/10.1145/1508284.1508249

Published: 07 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Multicore hardware is making concurrent programs pervasive. Unfortunately, concurrent programs are prone to bugs. Among different types of concurrency bugs, atomicity violation bugs are common and important. Existing techniques to detect atomicity violation bugs suffer from one limitation: requiring bugs to manifest during monitored runs, which is an open problem in concurrent program testing.

This paper makes two contributions. First, it studies the interleaving characteristics of the common practice in concurrent program testing (i.e., running a program over and over) to understand why atomicity violation bugs are hard to expose. Second, it proposes CTrigger to effectively and efficiently expose atomicity violation bugs in large programs. CTrigger focuses on a special type of interleavings (i.e., unserializable interleavings) that are inherently correlated to atomicity violation bugs, and uses trace analysis to systematically identify (likely) feasible unserializable interleavings with low occurrence-probability. CTrigger then uses minimum execution perturbation to exercise low-probability interleavings and expose difficult-to-catch atomicity violation.

We evaluate CTrigger with real-world atomicity violation bugs from four sever/desktop applications (Apache, MySQL, Mozilla, and PBZIP2) and three SPLASH2 applications on 8-core machines. CTrigger efficiently exposes the tested bugs within 1--235 seconds, two to four orders of magnitude faster than stress testing. Without CTrigger, some of these bugs do not manifest even after 7 full days of stress testing. In addition, without deterministic replay support, once a bug is exposed, CTrigger can help programmers reliably reproduce it for diagnosis. Our tested bugs are reproduced by CTrigger mostly within 5 seconds, 300 to over 60000 times faster than stress testing.

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Cited By

Sotiropoulos PVassilakis C(2025)A generalized, rule-based method for the detection of intermittent faults in software programsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112228219:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112228
Babaei MDingel J(2023)Efficient regression testing of distributed real-time reactive systems in the context of model-driven developmentSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-023-01086-522:5(1565-1587)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-023-01086-5
Zhai JJin YChen WZheng WZhai JJin YChen WZheng W(2023)Informed Memory Access MonitoringPerformance Analysis of Parallel Applications for HPC10.1007/978-981-99-4366-1_4(73-97)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4366-1_4
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Index Terms

CTrigger: exposing atomicity violation bugs from their hiding places
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 44, Issue 3

ASPLOS 2009

March 2009

346 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1508284

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS XIV: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
March 2009
358 pages
ISBN:9781605584065
DOI:10.1145/1508244
General Chair:
Mary Lou Soffa
University of Virginia, USA
,
Program Chair:
Mary Jane Irwin
Penn State University, USA

Copyright © 2009 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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 March 2009

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 44, Issue 3

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Cited By

Sotiropoulos PVassilakis C(2025)A generalized, rule-based method for the detection of intermittent faults in software programsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112228219:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112228
Babaei MDingel J(2023)Efficient regression testing of distributed real-time reactive systems in the context of model-driven developmentSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-023-01086-522:5(1565-1587)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-023-01086-5
Zhai JJin YChen WZheng WZhai JJin YChen WZheng W(2023)Informed Memory Access MonitoringPerformance Analysis of Parallel Applications for HPC10.1007/978-981-99-4366-1_4(73-97)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4366-1_4
Wong WGao RLi YAbreu RWotawa FLi D(2023)Software Fault Localization: an Overview of Research, Techniques, and ToolsHandbook of Software Fault Localization10.1002/9781119880929.ch1(1-117)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119880929.ch1
Ko YZhu BKim J(2022)Fuzzing with automatically controlled interleavings to detect concurrency bugsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111379191:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111379
Chen DJiang YXu CMa X(2021)On interleaving space exploration of multi-threaded programsFrontiers of Computer Science: Selected Publications from Chinese Universities10.1007/s11704-020-9501-615:4Online publication date: 1-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11704-020-9501-6
Wang ZWang HLiu SSun JWang HChen J(2020)IFIX: Fixing Concurrency Bugs While They Are Introduced2020 25th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS)10.1109/ICECCS51672.2020.00025(155-164)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECCS51672.2020.00025
Sotiropolos PVassilakis C(2020)Detection of intermittent faults in software programs through identification of suspicious shared variable access patternsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2019.110455159:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2019.110455
Yu ZZuo YZhao Y(2020)Convoider: A Concurrency Bug Avoider Based on Transparent Software Transactional MemoryInternational Journal of Parallel Programming10.1007/s10766-019-00642-148:1(32-60)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2020
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Yu ZZuo YXiong W(2019)Concurrency Bug Avoiding Based on Optimized Software Transactional MemoryScientific Programming10.1155/2019/94043232019Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
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