Optimistic Shared Memory Dependence Tracing (T)

Abstract

Inter-thread shared memory dependences are crucial to understanding the behavior of concurrent systems, as such dependences are the cornerstone of time-travel debugging and further predictive trace analyses. To enable effective and efficient shared memory dependence tracing, we present an optimistic scheme addressing the challenge of capturing exact dependences between unsynchronized events to reduce the probe effect of program instrumentation. Specifically, our approach achieved a wait-free fast path for thread-local reads on x86-TSO relaxed memory systems, and simultaneously achieved precise tracing of exact read-after-write, write-after-write and write-after-read dependences on the fly. We implemented an open-source RWTrace tool, and evaluation results show that our approach not only achieves efficient shared memory dependence tracing, but also scales well on a multi-core computer system.