Dynamic race detection techniques for interrupt-driven programs

Abstract

Data races are notorious concurrency bugs that are difficult to be reproduced and may lead programs into unintended nondeterministic executions. Asynchronous interrupts introduce fine-grained parallelism into interrupt-driven programs making them prone to data races and hard to be thoroughly tested and debugged. Unfortunately, only few tools and techniques have been proposed for dynamic data race detection in interrupt-driven programs that are however widely used in embedded systems. This paper surveys the existing dynamic race detection techniques for interrupt-driven programs, analyzes them to circumscribes the problems they face in reporting data races, and finally highlights the challenges that a dynamic race detection for interrupt-driven program needs to overcome. ? 2012 Springer-Verlag.