A Study of OS Schedulers for Concurrency Bugs

Concurrency related bugs are hard to detect and even harder to reproduce due to their time dependent nature. One big factor in non-determinism of multi-threaded applications is process scheduler of an operating system. In this work, we presented results of our study to understand the behavior of some of the selected concurrency bugs under different OS schedulers. The generalization of this study to a larger set of bugs caused by concurrent execution of a program is hard and may not be very precise in its nature. Still, the consistent nature of our results for a chosen set of separate bugs on multiple schedulers suggests that shorter time-slices and uniform inter-mixing of the execution units of a program by a scheduler can lead to the early manifestation of concurrency bugs in a software.