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Haifa Verification Conference

HVC 2006: Hardware and Software, Verification and Testing pp 183–197Cite as

Explaining Intermittent Concurrent Bugs by Minimizing Scheduling Noise

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4383))

Abstract

A noise maker is a tool for testing multi-threaded programs. It seeds shared memory accesses and synchronization events (concurrent events) with conditional context switches and timeouts during runtime, in order to increase the likelihood that a concurrent bug manifests itself. However, an instrumented program with many seeded events may not be useful for debugging; events have been seeded all over the source code and provide almost no information regarding the bug. We argue that for many bug patterns only a few relevant context switches are critical for the bug. Based on the observation that bugs involve only a small set of critical events, we develop a randomized algorithm to reduce the scheduling noise and discover these events related to the bug. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we experiment with debugging of industrial code, known open source code software, and programs representing known concurrent bugs. Our results demonstrate that this simple technique is in many cases very powerful, and significantly helps the user locating and understanding concurrent bugs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

    Yaniv Eytani & Timo Latvala

Authors
  1. Yaniv Eytani
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  2. Timo Latvala
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Editor information

Eyal Bin Avi Ziv Shmuel Ur

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© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Eytani, Y., Latvala, T. (2007). Explaining Intermittent Concurrent Bugs by Minimizing Scheduling Noise. In: Bin, E., Ziv, A., Ur, S. (eds) Hardware and Software, Verification and Testing. HVC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4383. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70889-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70889-6_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-70888-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70889-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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