Applying Transactional Memory for Concurrency-Bug Failure Recovery in Production Runs

摘要

Concurrency bugs widely exist and severely threaten system availability. Techniques that help recover from concurrencybug failures during production runs are highly desired. This paper proposes BugTM, an approach that applies transactional memory techniques for concurrency-bug recovery in production runs. Requiring no knowledge about where are concurrency bugs, BugTM uses static analysis and code transformation to enable BugTM-transformed software to recover from a concurrency-bug failure by rolling back and re-executing the recent history of a failure thread. BugTM is instantiated as three schemes that have different trade-offs in performance and recovery capability: BugTM(H) uses existing hardware transactional memory (HTM) support, BugTM(S) leverages software transactional memory techniques, and BugTM(HS) is a software-hardware hybrid design. BugTM greatly improves the recovery capability of state-of-the-art techniques with low run-time overhead and no changes to OS or hardware, while guarantees not to introduce new bugs.