Detecting Bugs of Concurrent Programs With Program Invariants

Concurrency bug detection is a time-consuming activity in the debugging process for concurrent programs. Existing techniques mainly focus on detecting data race bugs with pattern analysis; however, the number of interleaving patterns could be huge, only the most suspicious write-read pattern is given, and an oracle is needed, which is not available in the operational phase. This paper proposes a program-invariant-based technique to detect a class of concurrent program bugs. By unit testing of the components of a concurrent program, we obtain a set of program invariants, which can be used as an oracle to obtain “bad” invariants when the program is online. By using the function call graph of the components and applying a reduction technique to the invariants, we find the candidates of suspicious functions and rank them. From the interactions among components, we analyze the causes to the concurrency bugs. Experimental results show that our proposed technique is effective in concurrency bug detection.