A Lightweight and Portable Approach to Making Concurrent Failures Reproducible

Multithreaded concurrent programs often exhibit bugs due to unintended interferences among the concurrent threads. Such bugs are often hard to reproduce because they typically happen under very specific interleaving of the executing threads. Basically, it is very hard to fix a bug (or software failure) in concurrent programs without being able to reproduce it. In this paper, we present an approach, called ConCrash, that automatically and deterministically reproduces concurrent failures by recording logical thread schedule and generating unit tests. For a given bug (failure), ConCrash records the logical thread scheduling order and preserves object states in memory at runtime. Then, ConCrash reproduces the failure offline by simply using the saved information without the need for JVM-level or OS-level support. To reduce the runtime performance overhead, ConCrash employs a static datarace detection technique to report all possible race conditions, and only instruments such places. We...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: FASE
• Authors: Qingzhou Luo, Sai Zhang, Jianjun Zhao, Min Hu
• Keywords: Concurrent Programs, FASE 2010, Logical Thread, Multithreaded Concurrent Programs, Software Engineering