debugging concurrent software：advances and challenges.pdfVIP

Huang J, Zhang C. Debugging concurrent software: Advances and challenges. JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 31(5): 861–868 Sept. 2016. DOI 10.1007/s11390-016-1669-8 Debugging Concurrent Software: Advances and Challenges 1 2 Jeff Huang and Charles Zhang , Member, ACM, IEEE 1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas AM University, College Station, TX 77843, U.S.A. 2Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China E-mail: jeff@cse.tamu.edu; charlesz@cse.ust.hk Received May 18, 2016; revised July 7, 2016. Abstract Concurrency debugging is an extremely important yet challenging problem that has been hampering developer productivity and software reliability in the multicore era. We have worked on this problem in the past eight years and have developed several effective methods and automated tools for helping developers debugging shared memory concurrent programs. This article discusses challenges in concurrency debugging and summarizes our research contributions in four important directions: concurrency bug reproduction, detection, understanding, and fixing. It also discusses other recent advances in tackling these challenges. Keywords debugging, concurrency, record and replay 1 Introduction uations and may lead to fatal failures. What is worse is that thread interleavings are often non-deterministic. Detecting and repairing software defects, or bugs, Due to the scheduling non-determinism and the timing have been the most expensive parts of the software de- differences between different hardware cores, multiple velopment process[1]. In many real-world s