Axis: automatically fixing atomicity violations through solving control constraints

  • Authors:

  • Peng Liu;Charles Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China;Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Atomicity, a general correctness criteria in concurrency programs, is often violated in real-world applications. What is worse is that the violations are difficult to be fixed by the developers, which makes the automatic bug fixing techniques attractive solutions. The state of the art aims at automating the manual fixing process and can not provide any theoretical reasoning and guarantees. We provide an automatic approach that applies the well-studied control theory to guarantee the maximal preservation of the concurrency degree of the original code and no introduction of deadlocks. Under the hood, we reduce the problem of violation fixing to a constraint solving problem using the petri net model. Our evaluation on 13 subjects shows that the slowdown incurred by our patches is only 40% of that of the state of the art. With the deadlock-free guarantee, our patches incur moderate overhead (around 10%), which is a worthwhile cost for safety.