Studying state-of-the-art bug detectors for identifying PM bugs in the Linux kernel
Siyuan Lu · 2021
When researchers aim to build correct Persistent Memory(PM)-based systems, they meetdifferent problems because of the PM hardware complexity. Many PM-related bug detectors in the Linux kernel have been developed to address these bugs. In this paper, we study some state-of-the-art bug detectors for identifying PM bugs in theLinux Kernel. We identify and recreate reproducible cases by exiting bug detection tools, to explore if these tools are sufficient to detect PM bugs. On the one side, we generate Bitcode files in Razzer, to identify bugs in PM code paths. The results shows that Razzer can only detector 20% PM bugs on average. On the other side, we successfully recreate some PM bugs by Kmemcheck on QEMU.The limitations of state-of-the-art tools is found, which gives us better understand and opportunity to address them and improve existing PM bug detectors for Linux systems.