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clinuxrace-condition

Is there any tool which detects race conditions at runtime and rewrites code to avoid them in future

I have seen tools which can run a multithreaded program deterministically, even in the presence of race conditions. Now I wonder if there is any tool which can actually detect races and rewrite the code (at runtime) to not have the detected races in the future.

Does such kind of a tool exists? Or is it too hard to create one? I think it can be created with a tool that does dynamic binary translation of code, such as PIN or valgrind.

Solution

  • While running a program in a deterministic manner is too much to ask, detecting some (if not all) race conditions is not difficult.

    A lot of research is presently happening in this area. And you are on the right track with

    PIN -------> Intel Parallel Studio Valgrind --> Cachegrind and ThreadSanitizer 1.0

    There are many open source and commercial tools. I used to work on 1

    The way such tools work is that they track lock and other information per memory access and maintain a history of previous accesses. Every access is compared with history of previous accesses. There is more to it.