Automated atomicity-violation fixing

Fixing software bugs has always been an important and timeconsuming 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 nondeterministic 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 bugdetection 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-...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Guoliang Jin, Linhai Song, Wei Zhang, Shan Lu, Ben Liblit
• Keywords: Failure Probability, Parallel Reasoning, PLDI 2011, Programming Languages, Quality Patches