NDLI: RID:Finding Reference Count Bugs with Inconsistent Path Pair Checking (SIGP, Vol. 51, Issue. 4)

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Shi, Yuanchun Xiao, Qixue Mao, Junjie Chen, Yu
Abstract	Reference counts are widely used in OS kernels for resource management. However, reference counts are not trivial to be used correctly in large scale programs because it is left to developers to make sure that an increment to a reference count is always paired with a decrement. This paper proposes inconsistent path pair checking, a novel technique that can statically discover bugs related to reference counts without knowing how reference counts should be changed in a function. A prototype called RID is implemented and evaluations show that RID can discover more than 80 bugs which were confirmed by the developers in the latest Linux kernel. The results also show that RID tends to reveal bugs caused by developers' misunderstanding on API specifications or error conditions that are not handled properly.
Starting Page	531
Ending Page	544
Page Count	14
File Format	PDF
ISSN	03621340 15581160
DOI	10.1145/2954679.2872389
Journal	ACM SIGPLAN Notices (SIGP)
Volume Number	51
Issue Number	4
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1983-05-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Inconsistency Static analysis Reference counting
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design Software

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RID:Finding Reference Count Bugs with Inconsistent Path Pair Checking (SIGP, Vol. 51, Issue. 4)