On-the-fly Monitoring Tool for Detecting Data Races in Multithread Programs

Bong-Jun Paeng, Se-Won Park, In-Bon Kuh, Ok-Kyoon Ha, Yong-Kee Jun

http://doi.org/

It is difficult and cumbersome to figure out whether a multithread program runs with concurrency bugs, such as data races and atomicity violations, because there are many possible executions of the program and a lot of the defects are hard to reproduce. Hence, monitoring techniques for collecting and analyzing the information from program execution, such as thread executions, memory accesses, and synchronization information, are important to locate data races for debugging multithread programs. This paper presents an efficient and practical monitoring tool, called VcTrace, that analyzes the partial ordering of concurrent threads and events during an execution of the program based on the vector clock system. Empirical results on C/C++ benchmarks using Pthreads show that VcTrace is a sound and practical tool for on-the-fly data race detection as well as for analyzing multithread programs.