Understanding, Detecting and Exposing Concurrency Bugs

143 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.The third main contribution is along the lines of exploring concurrent programs' interleaving space and exposing concurrency bugs. This thesis presents a hierarchy of interleaving coverage criteria. This hierarchy includes seven interleaving coverage criteria that are designed based on different concurrency bug models and provides guidance to interleaving space exploration. Guided by the coverage criteria research, a testing framework, CTrigger, is built to expose atomicity violation bugs. CTrigger's testing space, called unserializable interleaving space, is carefully designed to balance its complexity and bug-exposing capability. Within this testing space, CTrigger uses trace analysis to identify feasible and rare unserializable interleavings; it uses low-overhead execution perturbation to exercise these interleavings and effectively expose atomicity violation bugs. Experiments have shown that CTrigger can expose real-world atomicity violation bugs 100--1000 times faster than the common practice stress testing. In addition, CTrigger can reliably repeat the bugs that are exposed once 300 to more than 60,000 times faster than stress testing, which will greatly expedite the software failure diagnosis process.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD