HawkSet: Automatic, Application-Agnostic, and Efficient Concurrent PM Bug Detection

Persistent Memory (PM) enables the development of fast, persistent applications without employing costly HDD/SSDbased I/O operations. Since caches are volatile and CPUs may reorder and stall memory accesses for performance, developers must use low-level instructions to ensure a consistent state in case of a crash. Failure to do so can result in data corruption, data loss, or undefined behavior. In concurrent executions, this exposes a new class of bugs.

HawkSet is an automatic, application-agnostic, and efficient tool to detect concurrent PM bugs. HawkSet uses lockset analysis, and automatic binary instrumentation to find all the bugs detected by the state-of-the-art tools and 7 previously unknown bugs. This is achieved without requiring application-specific knowledge or models, nor specialized debugging artifacts or guided executions. Compared to the state-of-the-art, HawkSet offers up to a 159× speedup, and consistently detects harder-to-reach bugs, where a rare interleaving is required.

• Hardware → Emerging technologies; • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging.