We present Symbiosis: a concurrency debugging technique based on novel  differential schedule projections  (DSPs). A DSP shows the small set of memory operations and dataflows responsible for a failure, as well as a reordering of those elements that avoids the failure. To build a DSP, Symbiosis first generates a  full, failing, multithreaded schedule  via thread path profiling and symbolic constraint solving. Symbiosis selectively reorders events in the failing schedule to produce a  nonfailing, alternate schedule . A DSP reports the ordering and dataflow  differences  between the failing and nonfailing schedules. Our evaluation on buggy real-world software and benchmarks shows that, in practical time, Symbiosis generates DSPs that both isolate the small fraction of event orders and dataflows responsible for the failure and report which event reorderings prevent failing. In our experiments, DSPs contain 90p fewer events and 96p fewer dataflows than the full failure-inducing schedules. We also conducted a user study that shows that, by allowing developers to focus on only a few events, DSPs reduce the amount of time required to understand the bug’s root cause and find a valid fix.
['Nuno Machado', 'Daniel Quinta', 'Brandon Lucia', 'Luís E. T. Rodrigues']
Concurrency Debugging with Differential Schedule Projections