AVIO: detecting atomicity violations via access interleaving invariants

Concurrency bugs are among the most difficult to test and diagnose of all software bugs. The multicore technology trend worsens this problem. Most previous concurrency bug detection work focuses on one bug subclass, data races, and neglects many other important ones such as atomicity violations, which will soon become increasingly important due to the emerging trend of transactional memory models. This paper proposes an innovative, comprehensive, invariantbased approach called AVIO to detect atomicity violations. Our idea is based on a novel observation called access interleaving invariant, which is a good indication of programmers’ assumptions about the atomicity of certain code regions. By automatically extracting such invariants and detecting violations of these invariants at run time, AVIO can detect a variety of atomicity violations. Based on this idea, we have designed and built two implementations of AVIO and evaluated the trade-offs between them. The first implementation, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Shan Lu, Joseph Tucek, Feng Qin, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2006, Atomicity Violations, AVIO, Bug Detection, Programming Languages