research-article

Automated atomicity-violation fixing

Authors:

Ben LiblitAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '11: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 389 - 400

https://doi.org/10.1145/1993498.1993544

Published: 04 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Fixing software bugs has always been an important and time-consuming process in software development. Fixing concurrency bugs has become especially critical in the multicore era. However, fixing concurrency bugs is challenging, in part due to non-deterministic failures and tricky parallel reasoning. Beyond correctly fixing the original problem in the software, a good patch should also avoid introducing new bugs, degrading performance unnecessarily, or damaging software readability. Existing tools cannot automate the whole fixing process and provide good-quality patches.

We present AFix, a tool that automates the whole process of fixing one common type of concurrency bug: single-variable atomicity violations. AFix starts from the bug reports of existing bug-detection tools. It augments these with static analysis to construct a suitable patch for each bug report. It further tries to combine the patches of multiple bugs for better performance and code readability. Finally, AFix's run-time component provides testing customized for each patch. Our evaluation shows that patches automatically generated by AFix correctly eliminate six out of eight real-world bugs and significantly decrease the failure probability in the other two cases. AFix patches never introduce new bugs and usually have similar performance to manually-designed patches.

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Index Terms

Automated atomicity-violation fixing
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. Software and its engineering

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '11: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2011

668 pages

ISBN:9781450306638

DOI:10.1145/1993498

General Chair:
Mary Hall
University of Utah
,
Program Chair:
David Padua
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 6
PLDI '11
June 2011
652 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1993316
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2011 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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Published: 04 June 2011

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PLDI '11: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 4 - 8, 2011

California, San Jose, USA

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2024.3380393
Huang RShen QWang YWu YWu ZLuo XRuan A(2024)ReenRepair: Automatic and semantic equivalent repair of reentrancy in smart contractsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112107216(112107)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112107
Cai YYao PYe CZhang CCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)Place your locks wellProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620446(3727-3744)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620446
Utture APalsberg JChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)From Leaks to Fixes: Automated Repairs for Resource Leak WarningsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616267(159-171)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
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