Automated atomicity-violation fixing

  • Authors:

  • Guoliang Jin;Linhai Song;Wei Zhang;Shan Lu;Ben Liblit

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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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.