A lightweight and portable approach to making concurrent failures reproducible

Abstract. Concurrent programs often exhibit bugs due to unintended interfer-ences among the concurrent threads. Such bugs are often hard to reproduce be-cause they typically happen under very specific interleaving of the executing threads. Basically, it is very hard to fix a bug (or software failure) in concur-rent 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 data race detection technique to report potential possible race conditions, and only instruments such places. We implement the ConCrash approach in a prototype tool for Java and experimented on a num-ber of multi-threaded Java benchmarks. As a result, we successfully reproduced a number of real concurrent bugs (e.g., deadlocks, data races and atomicity vio-lation) within an acceptable overhead.