Finding concurrency errors in sequential code: OS-level, in-vivo model checking of process races
Oren Laadan, Chia-Che Tsai, Nicolas Viennot, Chris Blinn, Peter Senyao Du, Junfeng Yang, Jason Nieh · Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems · 2011
While thread races have drawn huge attention from the research community, little has been done for process races, where multiple--possibly sequential--processes access a shared resource, such as a file, without proper synchronization. We present a preliminary study of real process races and show that they are numerous, dangerous, and difficult to detect. To address this problem, we present the design of RACEPRO, an in-vivo model checking system for automatically detecting process races in deployed systems, along with preliminary results from a RACEPRO prototype. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study real process races, and RACEPRO is the first system to detect them.