RELAY: static race detection on millions of lines of code

ABSTRACT

Data races occur when multiple threads are about to access the same piece of memory, and at least one of those accesses is a write. Such races can lead to hard-to-reproduce bugs that are time consuming to debug and fix. We present RELAY, a static and scalable race detection analysis in which unsoundness is modularized to a few sources. We describe the analysis and results from our experiments using RELAY to find data races in the Linux kernel, which includes about 4.5 million lines of code.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification
          Subjects: Reliability

General Terms:
Reliability, Verification

Keywords:
race detection, static analysis