NDLI: Practical lock/unlock pairing for concurrent programs

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Hyoun Kyu Cho Kelly, T. Yin Wang Lafortune, S. Hongwei Liao Mahlke, S.
Copyright Year	2013
Abstract	In the multicore era, developers face increasing pressure to parallelize their programs. However, building correct and efficient concurrent programs is substantially more difficult than building sequential ones. To address the multicore challenge, numerous tools have been developed to assist multithreaded programmers, including static and dynamic bug detectors, automated bug fixers, and optimization tools. Many of these tools rely on or benefit from the precise identification of critical sections, i.e., sections where the thread of execution holds at least one lock. For languages where critical sections are not lexically scoped, e.g., C/C++, static analysis often fails to pair up lock and unlock calls correctly. In this paper, we propose a practical lock/unlock pairing mechanism that combines static analysis with dynamic instrumentation to identify critical sections in POSIX multithreaded C/C++ programs. Our method first applies a con-servative inter-procedural path-sensitive dataflow analysis to pair up all lock and unlock calls. When the static analysis fails, our method makes assumptions about the pairing using common heuristics. These assumptions are checked at runtime using lightweight instrumentation. Our experiments show that only one out of 891 lock/unlock pairs violates our assumptions at runtime and the instrumentation imposes negligible overhead of 3.34% at most, for large open-source server programs. Overall, our mechanism can pair up 98.2% of all locks including 7.1 % of them paired speculatively.
Sponsorship	IEEE Comput. Soc.
Starting Page	1
Ending Page	12
File Size	254924
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781467355247
e-ISBN	9781467355254
DOI	10.1109/CGO.2013.6494990
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2013-02-23
Publisher Place	China
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Programming System recovery Concurrent computing Analytical models Algorithm design and analysis Context modeling Context Dynamic monitoring Program analysis Critical section Concurrent programs Static analysis
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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