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Discovering Concurrency Errors

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Lectures on Runtime Verification

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10457))

Abstract

Lots of concurrent software is being developed for the now ubiquitous multicore processors. And concurrent programming is difficult because it is quite easy to introduce errors that are really hard to diagnose and fix. One of the main obstacles to concurrent programming is that threads are scheduled nondeterministically and their interactions may become hard to predict and to devise. This chapter addresses the nature of concurrent programming and some classes of concurrency errors. It discusses the application of dynamic program analysis techniques to detect, locate and diagnose some common concurrency errors like data races, atomicity violations and deadlocks. This chapter also mentions some techniques that can help with quality assurance of concurrent programs, regardless of any particular class of concurrency errors, like noise injection and systematic testing, and it is closed by some prospects of concurrent software development.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this Chapter, we concentrate on the shared memory paradigm, leaving behind the distributed memory and message passing paradigms, which are covered elsewhere in this book.

  2. 2.

    Some atomicity violations can be, actually, seen as a low-level violations of ordering expectations and deadlocks, in addition, are often caused by a wrong order of locking operations. Here, we do not consider atomicity violations and deadlocks as order violations.

  3. 3.

    Mixed errors are errors that have both finite witnesses as well as infinite ones whose any finite prefix does not suffice as a witness.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by the ARVI EU COST ACTION IC1402. Further, the Czech authors were supported by the EU ECSEL project Aquas, the internal BUT FIT project FIT-S-17-4014, and the IT4IXS project: IT4Innovations Excellence in Science (LQ1602). The Portuguese author was also supported by the Portuguese Science Foundation and NOVA LINCS (ref. UID/CEC/04516/2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NOVA LINCS, DI, FCT, NOVA University Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    João M. Lourenço

  2. Faculty of Information Technology, IT4Innovations Centre of Excellence, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic

    Jan Fiedor, Bohuslav Křena & Tomáš Vojnar

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  1. João M. Lourenço
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Correspondence to João M. Lourenço .

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  1. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Ezio Bartocci

  2. Université Grenoble Alpes, Inria, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble, Grenoble, France

    Yliès Falcone

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Lourenço, J.M., Fiedor, J., Křena, B., Vojnar, T. (2018). Discovering Concurrency Errors. In: Bartocci, E., Falcone, Y. (eds) Lectures on Runtime Verification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10457. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75632-5_2

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