Analyzing multicore dumps to facilitate concurrency bug reproduction

Debugging concurrent programs is difficult. This is primarily because the inherent non-determinism that arises because of scheduler interleavings makes it hard to easily reproduce bugs that may manifest only under certain interleavings. The problem is exacerbated in multi-core environments where there are multiple schedulers, one for each core. In this paper, we propose a reproduction technique for concurrent programs that execute on multi-core platforms. Our technique performs a lightweight analysis of a failing execution that occurs in a multi-core environment, and uses the result of the analysis to enable reproduction of the bug in a single-core system, under the control of a deterministic scheduler. More specifically, our approach automatically identifies the execution point in the re-execution that corresponds to the failure point. It does so by analyzing the failure core dump and leveraging a technique called execution indexing that identifies a related point in the re-execution. By generating a core dump at this point, and comparing the differences betwen the two dumps, we are able to guide a search algorithm to efficiently generate a failure inducing schedule. Our experiments show that our technique is highly effective and has reasonable overhead.