We address the problem of statically finding bugs due to concurrency, and do so without reporting false positives. This problem is important because false reports of concurrent bugs are even less acceptable than those of sequential bugs. (Typically programmers need to examine larger amount of code in diagnosing the report of a concurrent bug than sequential one.) Avoiding false positives for concurrent bugs is more difficult, because techniques like symbolic execution, used for avoiding false reports of sequential bugs, become prohibitively expensive for parallel programs. Our proposed solution is pointer analysis accurate enough to report concurrent bugs without too many false positives. For our implementation the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency is driven by the needs of an algorithm for deadlock detection.
By: Daniel Brand; Marcio Buss; Vugranam C. Sreedhar
Published in: RC24995 in 2010
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