A Concurrency Testing Tool and Its Plug-Ins for Dynamic Analysis and Runtime Healing

This report presents a tool for concurrency testing (abbreviated as ConTest) and some of its extensions. The extensions (called plug-ins in this report) are implemented through the listener architecture of ConTest. Two plugins for runtime detection of common concurrent bugs are presented—the first (Eraser+) is able to detect data races while the second (AtomRace) is able to detect not only data races but also more general bugs caused by violation of atomicity presumptions. A third plug-in presented in this report is designed for hiding bugs that made it into the field so that when problems are detected they can be circumvented. Several experiments demonstrate the capabilities of these plug-ins.