Efficiently detecting concurrency bugs in persistent memory programs
Zhangyu Chen, Yu Hua, Yongle Zhang, Luochangqi Ding · 2022
Due to the salient DRAM-comparable performance, TB-scale capacity, and non-volatility, persistent memory (PM) provides new opportunities for large-scale in-memory computing with instant crash recovery. However, programming PM systems is error-prone due to the existence of crash-consistency bugs, which are challenging to diagnose especially with concurrent programming widely adopted in PM applications to exploit hardware parallelism. Existing bug detection tools for DRAM-based concurrency issues cannot detect PM crash-consistency bugs because they are oblivious to PM operations and PM consistency. On the other hand, existing PM-specific debugging tools only focus on sequential PM programs and cannot effectively detect crash-consistency issues hidden in concurrent executions.