Finding Concurrency-Related Bugs Using Random Isolation

  • Authors:

  • Nicholas Kidd;Thomas Reps;Julian Dolby;Mandana Vaziri

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Wisconsin,;University of Wisconsin, and GrammaTech, Inc.,;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,

  • Venue:
  • VMCAI '09 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper describes the methods used in Empire , a tool to detect concurrency-related bugs, namely atomic-set serializability violations in Java programs. The correctness criterion is based on atomic sets of memory locations, which share a consistency property, and units of work , which preserve consistency when executed sequentially. Empire checks that, for each atomic set, its units of work are serializable. This notion subsumes data races (single-location atomic sets), and serializability (all locations in one atomic set). To obtain a sound, finite model of locking behavior for use in Empire , we devised a new abstraction principle, random isolation , which allows strong updates to be performed on the abstract counterpart of each randomly-isolated object. This permits Empire to track the status of a Java lock, even for programs that use an unbounded number of locks. The advantage of random isolation is that properties proved about a randomly-isolated object can be generalized to all objects allocated at the same site. We ran Empire on eight programs from the ConTest benchmark suite, for which Empire detected numerous violations.