Abstract
Data races represent one of the most notorious class of bugs in shared-memory parallel programs since they are hard to reproduce and can lead programs into unintended nondeterministic executions. However, data races can also show up in sequential programs that use signals when a signal handler and the sequential program both access without proper synchronization, a shared variable with at least one write-access operation. Unfortunately, existing tools for race detection in such programs produce high time and space overhead that drastically slow down the monitored program. This overhead is partly due to the use of costly and inappropriate timestamps originally designed for threads’ ordering in multithreaded programs. This paper presents a lightweight labeling scheme for efficient on-the-fly race detection in sequential programs that use signal handlers. This scheme generates constant-sized labels for the program and its signal handlers and determines the logical concurrency between instructions accessing the same shared memory. Generating and comparing concurrency information are done in constant time. The efficiency of the technique and its limited footprint on the program execution make the on-the-fly race detection more practical in sequential programs.
This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency), NIPA-2010-(C1090-1031-0007).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Agarwal, A., Garg, V.K.: Efficient Dependency Tracking for Relevant Events in SharedMemory Systems. In: The 24th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2005), pp. 19–28. ACM, Las Vegas (2005)
Baldoni, R., Raynal, M.: Fundamentals of Distributed Computing: A Practical Tour of Vector Clock Systems. IEEE Distributed Systems Online 3(2) (2002)
Banerjee, U., Bliss, B., Ma, Z., Petersen, P.: A Theory of Data Race Detection. In: Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing and Debugging, pp. 69–78. ACM, New York (2006)
Dinning, A., Schonberg, E.: An Empirical Comparison of Monitoring Algorithms for Access Anomaly Detection. In: The Second ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles & Practice of Parallel Programming, pp. 1–10. ACM, New York (1990)
Dowd, M., McDonald, J., Schuh, J.: The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Preventing Software Vulnerabilities, 1st edn. Addison-Wesley Professional, Massachusetts (2006)
Fidge, C.J.: Logical Time in Distributed Computing Systems. Computer 53(11), 28–33 (1991)
Flanagan, C., Freund, S.N.: FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection. Communications of the ACM, 93–101 (November 2010)
Jun, Y., Koh, K.: On-The-Fly Detection of Access Anomalies in Nested Parallel Loops. In: The 1993 ACM/ONR Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Debugging, pp. 107–117. ACM, California (1993)
Mellor-Crummey, J.: On-The-Fly Detection of Data Races for Programs with Nested Fork-Join Parallelism. In: The 1991 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (SC 1991), pp. 24–33. ACM, New York (1991)
Netzer, R.H.B., Miller, B.P.: What Are Race Conditions? Some Issues and Formalizations. ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems 1(1), 74–88 (1992)
Ousterhout, J.K.: Why Threads are a Bad Idea (for most purposes). In: USENIX 1996: Invited talk at the 1996 USENIX Technical Conference, USENIX (1996)
Ronsse, M., Maebe, J., De Bosschere, K.: Detecting Data Races in Sequential Programs with DIOTA. In: Danelutto, M., Vanneschi, M., Laforenza, D. (eds.) Euro-Par 2004. LNCS, vol. 3149, pp. 82–89. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Tahara, T., Gondow, K., Ohsuga, S.: Dracula: Detector of Data Races in Signals Handlers. In: The 15th IEEE Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2008), pp. 17–24. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2008)
The Open Group, and IEEE: The Open Group Technical Standard Base Specifications, (7), POSIX.1-2008 (2008), http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
Zalewski, M.: Delivering Signals for Fun and Profit (2001), http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/signals.txt
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tchamgoue, G.M., Ha, OK., Kim, KH., Jun, YK. (2011). Lightweight Labeling Scheme for On-the-fly Race Detection of Signal Handlers. In: Kim, Th., Adeli, H., Robles, R.J., Balitanas, M. (eds) Ubiquitous Computing and Multimedia Applications. UCMA 2011. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 151. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20998-7_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20998-7_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20997-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20998-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)