Article

Automated concurrency-bug fixing

Authors:

Shan LuAuthors Info & Claims

OSDI'12: Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

Pages 221 - 236

Published: 08 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Concurrency bugs are widespread in multithreaded programs. Fixing them is time-consuming and error-prone. We present CFix, a system that automates the repair of concurrency bugs. CFix works with a wide variety of concurrency-bug detectors. For each failure-inducing interleaving reported by a bug detector, CFix first determines a combination of mutual-exclusion and order relationships that, once enforced, can prevent the buggy interleaving. CFix then uses static analysis and testing to determine where to insert what synchronization operations to force the desired mutual-exclusion and order relationships, with a best effort to avoid deadlocks and excessive performance losses. CFix also simplifies its own patches by merging fixes for related bugs.

Evaluation using four different types of bug detectors and thirteen real-world concurrency-bug cases shows that CFix can successfully patch these cases without causing deadlocks or excessive performance degradation. Patches automatically generated by CFix are of similar quality to those manually written by developers.

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cover image ACM Other conferences

OSDI'12: Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

October 2012

362 pages

ISBN:9781931971966

Program Chairs:
Amin Vahdat
Google and University of California, San Diego
,
Chandu Thekkath
Microsoft Research Silicon Valley

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Infosys
EMC2: EMC2
Microsoft Reasearch: Microsoft Reasearch
ORACLE: ORACLE
USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc

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SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

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USENIX Association

United States

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Published: 08 October 2012

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Cited By

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Sintaha MNashid NMesbah A(2023) Katana: Dual Slicing Based Context for Learning Bug FixesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357964032:4(1-27)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
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Qiu ZShao SZhao QJin GSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)Understanding and detecting server-side request races in web applicationsProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468594(842-854)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
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