Predicting All Data Race Pairs for a Specific Schedule (extended version)

Abstract

We consider the problem of data race prediction where the program's behavior is represented by a trace. A trace is a sequence of program events recorded during the execution of the program. We employ the schedulable happens-before relation to characterize all pairs of events that are in a race for the schedule as manifested in the trace. Compared to the classic happens-before relation, the schedulable happens-before relations properly takes care of write-read dependencies and thus avoids false positives. The challenge is to efficiently identify all (schedulable) data race pairs. We present a refined linear time vector clock algorithm to predict many of the schedulable data race pairs. We introduce a quadratic time post-processing algorithm to predict all remaining data race pairs. This improves the state of the art in the area and our experiments show that our approach scales to real-world examples. Thus, the user can systematically examine and fix all program locations that are in a race for a particular schedule.