Strengthening Induction-Based Race Checking with Lightweight Static Analysis

Direct Memory Access (DMA) is key to achieving high performance in system-level software for multicore processors such as the Cell Broadband Engine. Incorrectly orchestrated DMAs cause DMA races, leading to subtle bugs that are hard to reproduce and fix. In previous work, we have shown that kinduction yields an effective method for proving absence of a restricted class of DMA races. We extend this work to handle a larger class of DMA races. We show that the applicability of k-induction can be significantly improved when combined with three inexpensive static analyses: 1) abstract-interpretation-based static analysis; 2) chunking, a domain-specific invariant generation technique; and 3) code transformations based on statement independence. Our techniques are implemented in the SCRATCH tool. We evaluate our work on industrial benchmarks.