Automated Atomicity-Violation Fixing

作者：Jin Guoliang^*; Song Linhai; Zhang Wei; Lu Shan; Liblit Ben

来源：ACM Sigplan Notices, 2011, 46(6): 389-400.

DOI：10.1145/1993316.1993544

• Algorithms
• Experimentation
• Languages
• Measurement
• Performance
• Reliability
• Verification
• atomicity violations
• automated debugging
• concurrency
• critical regions
• deadlock
• mutex locks
• mutual exclusion
• patching
• static analysis

Fixing software bugs has always been an important and time-consuming process in software development. Fixing concurrency bugs has become especially critical in the multicore era. However, fixing concurrency bugs is challenging, in part due to non-deterministic failures and tricky parallel reasoning. Beyond correctly fixing the original problem in the software, a good patch should also avoid introducing new bugs, degrading performance unnecessarily, or damaging software readability. Existing tools cannot automate the whole fixing process and provide good-quality patches.
We present AFix, a tool that automates the whole process of fixing one common type of concurrency bug: single-variable atomicity violations. AFix starts from the bug reports of existing bug-detection tools. It augments these with static analysis to construct a suitable patch for each bug report. It further tries to combine the patches of multiple bugs for better performance and code readability. Finally, AFix's run-time component provides testing customized for each patch. Our evaluation shows that patches automatically generated by AFix correctly eliminate six out of eight real-world bugs and significantly decrease the failure probability in the other two cases. AFix patches never introduce new bugs and usually have similar performance to manually-designed patches.