AR653: Dynamic detection tool for atomicity races in ARINC 653 applications

Abstract

Atomicity races in ARINC 653 applications are a kind of concurrency bugs which causes nondeterministic behaviors by parallel processes. The defects must be detected to ensure the reliability of the applications, because they may lead to unpredictable results to the programmer. This paper presents a tool, called AR653, to dynamically detect atomicity races for an execution of the application. The tool monitors only minimal information, such as processes, semaphores, and read/write accesses to shared resources, and analyzes the relation of synchronizations to report atomicity races throgh a locking decipline of semaphores. We compared the accuracy of AR653 with CodeSonar using synthetic programs on a simulation system for integrated modular avionics. The emperiacal results show that our tool correctly reports atomicity races in cases of using shared pointers as well as in cases of using shared variables, while CodeSonar only locates atomicity races in cases of unsing shared variables. ? 2016 SERSC.