Detecting data races on weak memory systems
Sarita V. Adve, Mark D. Hill, Barton P. Miller, Robert H. B. Netzer · 1991
For shared-memory systems, the most commonly assumed programmer's model of memory is sequential consistency. The weaker models of weak ordering, release consistency with sequentially consistent synchronization operations, data-race-free-0, and data-race-free-1 provide higher performance by guaranteeing sequential consistency to only a restricted class of programs - mainly programs that do not exhibit data races. To allow programmers to use the intuition and algorithms already developed for sequentially consistent systems, it is important to determine when a program written for a weak system exhibits no data races. In this paper, we investigate the extension of dynamic data race detection techniques developed for sequentially consistent systems to weak systems. A potential problem is that in the presence of a data race, weak systems fail to guarantee sequential consistency and therefore dynamic techniques may not give meaningful results. However, we reason that in practice a weak system...