Position Paper—ToleRace: Tolerating and Detecting Races

This paper introduces ToleRace, a software tool that increases the reliability of multi-threaded programs by tolerating or detecting race conditions. ToleRace modifies the implementation of critical sections at runtime to provide the following benefits. ToleRace allows programs with certain classes of races to operate as though the race did not exist. ToleRace probabilistically allows programmers to detect many of the remaining races when they happen, with low performance overhead. ToleRace achieves its ability to tolerate and detect races by judiciously duplicating shared data inside a critical section, thereby providing an illusion of atomicity when the shared data is updated. Our early experiments reveal that the performance overhead of ToleRace is considerably lower than existing dynamic race detection tools.