Davida: A Decentralization Approach to Localizing Transaction Sequences for Debugging Transactional Atomicity Violations

• Published in: IEEE transactions on reliability Vol. 72; no. 2; pp. 808 - 826
• Main Authors: Ma, Xiaoxue, Ashraf, Imran, Chan, W. K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Atomic properties; Atomicity violation detection; Codes; Cognition; Debugging; decentralized app- roach; dynamic analysis; Heterojunction bipolar transistors; localization of transaction sequences; Message systems; Terminology; Violations; Writing
• ISSN: 0018-9529; 1558-1721
• DOI: 10.1109/TR.2022.3176680

Atomicity is a desirable property for multithreaded programs. In such programs, a transaction is an execution of an atomic code region that may contain memory accesses on an arbitrary number of shared variables. When transactions are not conflicting with one another in a trace, they greatly simplify the reasoning of the program correctness. If a transaction incurs an atomicity violation in a trace, developers have to debug the code, but this is challenging. To achieve practical runtime performances, existing dynamic techniques for detecting such atomicity violations face a challenge: They are designed for either detecting all such atomicity violations without the capability of localizing the corresponding cross-thread transaction sequences or deliberately missing some atomicity violations in the trade of localizing some of them to support their atomicity violation detection. In this article, we propose Davida, a novel technique to address this problem. Davida efficiently tracks selective transactions and cross-thread dependency sequences over transactions reachable from the currently active transactions of all the threads in a decentralized manner. We prove that Davida precisely accomplishes every atomicity violation in a trace with an actual sequence of transactions triggering the violation. The experimental results on 15 subjects showed that Davida outperformed Velodrome, the previous graph-based state-of-the-art technique, in both performance and completeness.