Detect atomicity violations in concurrent programs through user assistance and identification of suspicious variable access patterns

Abstract

Atomicity violation bugs are a frequent problem in concurrency. Because of the unpredictable nature of thread interleaving, most current methods are unable to differentiate between harmful and benign atomicity violations. This makes it challenging to determine the existence of an actual bug. This paper presents a method for detecting atomicity violation bugs in programs based on user interaction. First, UserTrack matches access interleaving patterns to identify all potential violations. We then verify the programmer's atomicity intent between two logical access operations on the same thread and filter out some candidates. Finally, a user interaction mechanism checks the paths that do not produce atomicity violations when threads are interleaved. Our method focuses on a small number of interesting states and interleavings, while allowing the programmer to impose constraints on thread interleavings and explore all executions that satisfy these constraints. We continuously gather information through user feedback results and detect atomicity violation bugs that truly go against the programmer's intent. We evaluated the method using benchmark tests, which demonstrated the effectiveness of UserTrack in detecting atomicity violations.