Compiler Test-Program Generation via Memoized Configuration Search

Abstract

To ensure compilers' quality, compiler testing has received more and more attention, and test-program generation is the core task. In recent years, some approaches have been proposed to explore test configurations for generating more effective test programs, but they either are restricted by historical bugs or suffer from the cost-effectiveness issue. Here, we propose a novel test-program generation approach (called MCS) to further improving the performance of compiler testing. MCS conducts memoized search via multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) for guiding the construction of effective test configurations based on the memoization for the explored test configurations during the on-the-fly compiler-testing process. During the process, the elaborate coordination among configuration options can be also well learned by multi-agent RL, which is required for generating bug-triggering test programs. Specifically, MCS considers the diversity among test configurations to efficiently explore the input space and the testing results under each explored configuration to learn which portions of space are more bug-triggering. Our extensive experiments on GCC and LLVM demonstrate the performance of MCS, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art test-program generation approaches in bug detection. Also, MCS detects 16 new bugs on the latest trunk revisions of GCC and LLVM, and all of them have been confirmed or fixed by developers. MCS has been deployed by a global IT company (i.e., Huawei) for testing their in-house compiler, and detects 10 new bugs (covering all the 5 bugs detected by the compared approaches), all of which have been confirmed.